


Principles of Gravity

by Rhinocio



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bisexual Lance, Gay Keith, Gen, M/M, Multi, Nonbinary Pidge | Katie Holt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-07-17 11:32:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16094813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinocio/pseuds/Rhinocio
Summary: A simple scientific oopsie was all it took to drastically change the path of the war, and Keith and Lance are beginning to suspect it’s that same sort of contravention they need to find their place in – or out – of the resulting mess. These Paladins of Voltron (Or Maybe Not) know that in the blackness of the universe there are many things to be wary of, but the law of attraction is very quickly becoming their greatest enemy – it is incredible, it is terrifying, and it is absolute.Comments, art, and offhand notes about the story can be foundhere!





	1. Beginnings Like To Ride The Coattails of Mistakes and Awful Surprises

**Author's Note:**

> Is anyone at all surprised that I found a new show about space queers to dramatize? Huge thanks go out to [GwenhwyvarReads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GwenhwyvarReads/pseuds/GwenhwyvarReads) for her constant support, and to my beloved [CaveDwellers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaveDwellers/pseuds/CaveDwellers) for being as much a solid beta reader and enthusiast while living with me as she ever was over the web. I could not have imagined a better Red to my Blue.
> 
> As always, critique and comments are greatly appreciated, and I beg your patience – I’ve been plotting this since I binge-watched the first two seasons of Voltron and have multiple chapters done in advance, but can make no promises on reliable post consistency. For reference, this story is canon divergent right around episode 4.03, and ignores the Clone Shiro story arc.
> 
> Fun fact: while the primary romantic elements in this story are for Keith/Lance, I'm a multishipper at heart and just love seeing found family be affectionate with each other. Therefore there are a couple of strongly implied background ships, and an emotionally intimate scene or two for just about every possible OTP. Also, unlike some of my other fics, this one is smut-free.
> 
>   
>    
> 

The dead guys are the first sign something’s wrong.

Well, Lance thinks, scratching his head with his retracted bayard, that’s not entirely true. The first sign was the still photo of Pidge that was sent to them half a varga into their flight. Or, if he’s really being honest with himself, it was the itch at the back of his brain from what he could swear was the blue lion, a tickle of warning that shouldn’t have been there since Blue had all but orphaned him for her smaller red counterpart, and forfeited brain-hacking rights along with. Knowing his luck, there had been a great metaphorical blinking sign of exhortation from the moment Pidge offered details about the planet they’d shot down to, and Lance had just waltzed on past it with the blinders on. Wouldn’t have been the first time.

But he’s getting ahead of himself.

It had been a pretty standard call to action, what with the paging of paladins to the bridge, the constant beeping and booping of Pidge’s hands on keyboard displays, and the bright blinking light on the floating screen. The princess did her usual song and dance pleading for assistance from the group, as if they had a choice or moral security to say no. Glances were exchanged between crew, a silent drawing of straws. Then Shiro snapped to military attention like the officer he’d trained to be, arms crossed and eyebrows drawn, and started delegating.

“An evacuation beacon,” clarified Allura, and Lance nodded, adding his important two cents about potential adoring fans in trouble and his ability to swoop in and save alien babes. Pidge went on some long explanation defining an evac versus distress beacon, where the coordinates of the beacon pointed them to, and how it was a little odd that they were getting a familiar alert from a planet Voltron had never visited, but it really just boiled down to there being citizens in need of aid, and the paladins were just the heroes the floating space rock deserved. Also, Lance should lead the charge. That part wasn’t vocally agreed upon, but Lance himself felt it was an obvious choice, as he was clearly the best people-person – or people-paladin, if you will – and had the skill and charisma to both save the day and reassure the citizens that Voltron had their back. If there were thankful kisses to follow that assurance, well, he’d be brave and take one for the team.

Shiro sanctioned at least part of that thought with a nod, and told Lance to suit up for descent. The planet below had a thick gaseous atmosphere, but on the surface seemed much like a giant Earth, rife with ocean and plant life, so he and Pidge would be the most logical adventurers; he’d just opened his mouth to address the second chosen teammate when the Green Paladin held up a finger.

“We’ve got incoming galra ships at three o’ clock. Two freight vessels and a bunch of fighters.”

“Should that be, like, ‘three o’ ticker’?” Hunk mumbled, apparently thinking out loud. The hologram they had been eying the evacuation map on panned out and lit up with purple icons, slowly drifting to the east of the castle. “Does a clock metaphor even work in space? It’s kind of a three-dimensional plane and clocks really fit under the category of two-dimensional metaphors.”

“You didn’t sleep much last night, did you?” asked Keith, his voice equally as low and only half as curious. Hunk grunted.

“It doesn’t look like they know we’re here,” Pidge continued, ignoring the background chatter. “There aren’t any notable colonies or galra-controlled populations on any of the nearby planets, at least according to the castle’s 10,000-year-old map and the updated info from the rebellion I’ve plugged in. Actually, there aren’t any notable populations in this area at all, as far as we know, and we’re pretty far from any we do know about. It’s most likely we’ve stumbled onto a deep-space transport route.”

“Galra have no reason to take back-alley routes unless they’re hiding something,” Keith growled, and he had a point. They were lightyears off the beaten path, hovering near a dwarf star that contained all the energetic remnants of a final year university student. There was a black hole behind it that had been sucking its light and power up for presumable trillions of years like a comparable education facility, and three quiet hunks of rock that were orbiting them, of varying in size but all, according to Pidge, almost as dense as Lance. There was nothing out in this quadrant of space worth flying to, and the paladins were only here themselves because of a last-ditch wormhole escape whose trajectory was as specific as “anywhere but here”. If the galra were out this far, it was either because they had places to avoid or a secret base to dock at.

Considering the latter point, Shiro made a decision.

“Change of plans. Hunk, Allura, you’re with me. Pidge, are you capable of keeping an eye on the evacuation scene and being our surveillance while we trail those ships?”

“Can Voltron fly three hundred and eleven billion metres in a tic?”

“That’s a yes, definitely a yes,” Hunk supplied, after a long silence.

“I want you and the green lion out of sight, then, as close as you can get without alerting the galra. We need eyes and ears on where they’re headed. The rest of us will be out of range but ready in case of a firefight. Lance, Keith, you head down to the surface of that planet and find out who sent that beacon, and why.”

The boys exchanged looks from across the room, half perturbed and the other half confused. The changing of the guard and Keith’s return stay at the castle (for however long, time undetermined) during his leave from the Blades of Marmora had scrambled the clear boundaries of who had claim to pilot what, and when, and how. But if Allura was joining the mission that meant that the blue lion was out of Lance’s hands, and that he was probably the person who’d be steering Red. Only... with Keith hanging out the cockpit, would Red demand her former paladin? Would Red _share?_

Shiro seemed unconcerned, though he always had taken this ethereal bonding thing between pilots and lions better than the rest of them. Lance supposed they’d just jump in the giant space cat and see what happened. Hopefully Red would be willing to accept a temp driver in the case of serious injury or emergency. He’d yet to experience any of the lion’s particularities, but according to historical logs and Keith’s frustrations, it was possible Red would sooner let them both bleed out on a foreign planet than replace the ass in the driver’s chair.

Call it luck or trend continuation, but Allura dismissed the team and the Feline of Questionable Possession took to Lance’s control without hiccup. The descent to the planet below, a chalky-looking sphere of clouds and jungle, likewise went smoothly, forgiving that last jarring twitch to the side as Red dodged a large errant alien bug-thing. In retrospect, Lance nods to himself, tapping his fingers on his hip, the whole flight was unremarkable. Well, except for when the radio chatter from Shiro and Co. stopped coming through with no warning or sign of alarm from Red – it was Keith who made note of the silence. Then there was that strange still image.

“Any idea why Pidge would send us a selfie?” Lance had asked, tilting back in the pilot’s chair. Keith grunted behind him and leaned over the dash. It certainly wasn’t the most attractive photo Lance had ever seen, as it was a forward-facing image of the Green Paladin perched in her own driver’s seat that greeted them, and her mouth was half open as if someone had hit the capture button in the middle of a classic big-words-about-math-and-science explanation. There was no clear point to it, either, no following message or anything written on the screen to imply it was a joke or a distress call. Keith radioed back to the ship to ask if there was a problem, but it went without response. The boys had shrugged at each other and continued on. Lance made a mental note to ask someone to run diagnostics on the giant red robot – and maybe the green too – in case their dash cams were wigging out.

So that was odd, and the lack of contact from HQ was a little weird too, though the team had gone into sudden radio silence out of necessity before; if the other paladins had any chance of being intercepted by galra tech or were making some kind of risky stealth maneuver, they had probably gone on a closed channel to hide themselves and the castle. It wasn't overly worrisome. Keith might have preferred playing space ninja and Lance maybe would have chosen zero-grav dogfighting over a leisurely glide through the atmosphere of Earth 2.0, but they had their orders, and as soon as they checked things out the sooner they could be back with the rest of their cohort. “Get in, find answers, get out,” was the succinct way Keith put it.

There was one last nudge in Lance's mind before they began descent into the treetops, something that had tickled like the consciousness of the lion Allura now piloted, but settling on the planet proved more of a challenge than planned and had given him bigger, more irritating things to worry about than a brain-itch. Red, as it turned out, didn't like branches between her toes, and spent much longer than really necessary bouncing away from the trees the moment Lance thought he had finally stuck a landing.

In almost all aspects, the planet really was like a larger Earth, though thankfully of an unfamiliar enough biosphere that Lance wasn't visited by the Gut Punch of Homesickness (brother to the Green Goblin of Jealousy and Groaning Bellyache of Want For Food That Isn't Space Goo). Neither he nor Keith had much experience with rainforests, and through quick debate they had mutually decided that splitting up to explore wouldn't be a great idea.

“There's a chance of our comms shorting out, if we're not hearing from the others because of a technical issue,” Keith reasoned.

“Alien jungles means alien carnivorous plants and space jaguars, man,” Lance added.

Despite the way the red lion had had to wedge herself into a nest of leaves and twigs in order to land and left her paladins to jetpack their way to the surface, the marshy floor of the jungle planet was rather open for walking; the vast majority of plant life was tall and looming, all reaching for the suns and together blotting out their light. So they had taken to marching, weapons at the ready and the sound of water dripping and squelching under their boots almost deafening. It took a good varga before Lance realized that they were moving in such a sound vacuum because there were no bird calls, nor any sort of small mammal rustling through the trees. He had glanced up through the heavy canopy of greenery, searching, but that had lead only to tripping over a root of something and wiping out in the mud. Lance decided past that that if a large space cat of the non-robot variety were laying in wait for them to pass underneath its claws, that was simply the path of fate and he'd deal with that when it came.

Lance had just pulled up a holomap of the evacuation beacon location when Keith had called his name and waved him over to a curving rock wall. That’s where the plot began, Lance thinks, mental story rehashed. This, right here, is scene one, enter stage left. He swallows the thick taste of bile that’s clinging to his throat and grimaces.

“So,” the Blue Paladin finally says aloud, turning to his partner with a hand on his hip, “What the heck do we tell Allura and Coran?”

Keith's eyes are wide, and he chokes quietly and shrugs, still staring at the bodies before them. They've happened not only upon the one patch of bright sunlight in the apparent entire woods, but a campsite, relatively fresh with use. A good twenty foot patch around them holds arrays of colourful clothing, some hanging on makeshift clotheslines and a nearby basin still full of slightly oily-looking water. There's an whole building off to the right of the clearing, a construct of thin logs that's more sophisticated than the most advanced wilderness survival expert on Earth could ever hope to construct with anything less than an electrical saw and small crane. Waxy fronds are stuffed in every gap between the wood, making the little house look a bit like it's wearing a cheap costume wig. There's a small boxy shed of sorts that looks like it was made for storing and smoking meats, though the sad collection of bones in the clay pot hovering over the ashes of a fire suggests there wasn't much in the way of food to store. Lance glances back to the assumable campsite owners and confirms the thought with their sunken cheeks and the layers of blankets and moss they've packed around themselves.

They almost look cozy, all tucked together against the rock wall, arms tangled among each other's and sunlight warming their faces. But even from afar the pallor of their three varying skin tones screams stagnancy, and the glazed look of the fellow to the left clearly says he hasn't blinked in a very long while. There's no movement in any ribcages by breath or heartbeat, and the faint breeze that slips in through the gap in the trees moves only the tired strands of their long hair.

Keith steps forward with a deep inhale, crouching next to the closest man and reaching out to unravel his arm from the depths of its blanket fortress. He lifts the limb and gives it a gentle shake to watch the fingers flop, then sets it carefully down again and hesitates only a moment before pushing his eyelids shut.

“Oh, gross,” Lance gags.

“They're past the point of rigor mortis,” Keith says, wiping his fingers in the mud and shivering with discomfort, “And they stink. So probably rotting already. These men have been dead for a while.”

“Just a thought, but shouldn't ten thousand years of being dead have you at the point of, like, rotting to bones? Or rotting away entirely?”

“Yeah,” the Red Paladin says slowly. “Lance, these guys didn't die that long ago. I'm just comparing to animal carcasses I saw in the desert, but they're probably not much older than a week. It's moist and hot here, so maybe less, and there's no sign that anything's started, uh, eating them...”

“What the _heck_ are we going to tell Allura and Coran?”

Keith backs away from the bodies as if they're going to suddenly jump to life like zombies and chase them, and stands by his teammate's side with his arms crossed. Both boys barely look away from the surreal scene, even as Lance picks up the holomap from his side holster and pulls the signal back on screen. As if in response, a small beep from under the blankets makes the paladins perk up. Keith dashes over and yanks the blanket from their huddle in one rough movement, turning away with a cringe as the bodies shift slightly.

“That's the beacon,” Lance tells him, staring at the open palm of the middle man and the small device it holds, his throat dry. “Okay. So, we've got a trio of dead Alteans that died recently enough to send a distress beacon to Voltron. They've been toast probably about a week. We just got this signal today. That means... Keith, what does that mean?”

“It means we find out what's going on,” Keith replies, tone hard. He taps the side of his helmet and calls, “Allura, Shiro, come in. We've made it to the planet surface and we found something you're gonna want to see.”

The boys share a look as the eerie forest silence continues on.

“Allura, come in. It's Keith. We need information. When exactly did we receive the distress beacon from this planet? We've found the, uh, aliens that sent it, but the timing doesn't seem to line up. Is there any chance the galra ships Pidge is monitoring modified the signal?”

Lance begins fiddling with the holomap as Keith grunts in frustration and continues his calls, all echoing into the endless expanse of trees without answer. The screen of the GPS – or UPS, Lance supposes, since they use it throughout the universe – has a simple grid and point display, with faint shades in the background reflecting changes in altitude. There's coloured dots declaring each paladin's location, and though the red is no longer entirely accurate for Keith, it's comforting that the computer's stuck with that instead of changing to something similar to galra-representative purple. The three Altean men before them don't show up, since they've ceased giving out life signs, but there's a bright blinking orange circle directly in front of them that indicates the evacuation call they've been hunting. Lance pokes the symbol experimentally and watches as a series of Altean letters and numbers pop up. Staring at the stationary code of simple lines at the bottom, he interrupts, “Hey, Keith. How much alien do you read?”

He can't pull his eyes away from the display as a concept starts nagging him, but hears the crunch of nearing footfall as his partner responds, “About three words in Altean and six in Galran.”

“These are numbers, right? Tell me these are numbers,” Lance says, finger dragging along the sequence at the bottom of the screen. Keith leans closer.

“Uh, I think? Altean math kinda looks like Mayan, all dots and lines. So, yeah, I guess that's what those are?”

“Mayan, dude? Why do you even know that?”

“I studied broader topics in the desert than at the Garrison, let’s put it that way, ” Keith huffs, though there's an awkward, tight smile on his face that suggests he's trying to ease the tense mood. Lance plays along, as if their past schooling had anything in common besides of a fissure of talent and social prowess between them, and mumbles something about how overachievers like him never need to study anything. They both avoid looking at the dead men. “I didn’t think it was too far of a reach to compare Mayan glyphs to the Altean writing on the cave walls. And the drawings of the Blue Lion there were stylistically similar to the Nazca Lines, so I looked into a couple different ancient mesoamerican cultures.”

“I'm going to nod like I know what you're talking about and you're going to help me read this, you colossal nerd.”

“That's a one,” Keith sighs, pointing at a single line in the sequence. “Simplest symbol to pick out. The first four numbers in Altean are just lines next to each other, like Roman numerals.”

“Oh, see, those I know,” Lance says. “If we're going by that, then this V-looking thing is a five, right?”

“I think that's a six, actually.” Keith tilts his head, then huffs, “Pidge is way better at this. Five is a W, kinda, and then twelve is a W with two dots. Fourteen is a V with two dots. There's a swirl for nine, and a really overcomplicated character for twenty.” He scribbles something unidentifiable in the mud and a neat, almost bubbly '20' next to it, following the other numbers he's outlining for Lance. “Every second number has a sideways apostrophe thing next to it.”

Lance groans, rubbing the top of his helmet fervently in lieu of his hair. There are many things he dislikes about living in space, and despite the curiousness of it, adapting to alien language has been one of his few intense peeves. He's already gone through a cultural reworking once, having moved from a primarily Spanish-speaking world to one full of English slang and issues with physical contact, and adjusting a third time, without any sort of Rosetta Stone for written word, is more than a bit frustrating. The translators in each paladins' flight suit and throughout the castle handle speech, and picked up English quite easily by listening to their chatter during their first exploration of the Altean ship, but there's been technical issue in relating characters based on full words – “It's a bit like kanji,” Shiro had said – to a language with tens of thousands of combinations of thirty or so letters and symbols. Pidge and Hunk have studied more than any of them, out of sheer necessity in working with Altean tech, but for all intents and purposes Lance is completely illiterate in the language.

“Right,” he tries, despite the headache, “So Vs are sixes, but this one has a dash. So it's an eight. That's a twelve. This one is, what, thirty-four or some shit?”

Keith shrugs.

“Whatever.” Lance kneels down in the mud beside his teammate and reaches out to write his own line of arithmetical numerals, with lines under the gaps he's not sure how to translate. He ends with two separate strings of numbers, and folds his arms with a grunt. One finger escapes to point. “I'm thinking this top line is the position of the beacon on the holomap. Latitude and longitude. The bottom one is a time.”

The Red Paladin is up and prying the Alteans' beacon out of their cold, dead hands in a flash. Lance shudders, and leans away from the object as Keith slaps its screen to life. It's decidedly different than the beacons they normally give out to rescued civilizations on planets freed from the Galra Empire, though not by much. The dial is bigger, and the transmitter at the top is longer, like an antenna on an old cordless telephone. There are more foreign characters on the screen, but Keith figures out with a few determined jabs how to open the same page as Lance's map is displaying. They quickly set to figuring out the second sequence of numbers, shuffling backwards on the ground as they draw like a couple of children playing in the dirt.

It's hard not to feel like the corpses are watching them, Lance decides, especially when there's no way they're translating correctly.

“Allura, can you hear me?” Keith calls into his helmet, and still only silence responds to the page. He's sitting back on his haunches, head in his hands and eyes firmly avoiding Lance's, which is just as well, because Lance is going over and over the numbers they've drawn out, creep factor negated on touching the Altean transmitter out of sheer desperation to understand. He clenches both in his hands and looks between the two screens, comparing symbols and sequences. “Allura!”

Lance stands quickly, dropping both tiny computers and linking his hands behind his neck. He paces a quick, tight circle, looks up to the canopy with a breath, and decides, “We need to get back to Red. We take a few photos for evidence and then see if we can contact the castle from our lion.”

He avoids saying, “Something's wrong,” because they both know it. Keith locks both devices onto his belt, takes a few key snapshots of the scene with the miniature computer in the arm of his suit (his jaw clenches when he photographs the dead men, and Lance looks away), and then wills his Marmoran blade into its full sword extension. They leave at a run. Keith vaults off the side of the rock wall as he turns the corner like a frat boy doing parkour, and Lance would make fun of him to lighten the mood, except he’s having a hard time catching his breath and is busy trying not to slip in the puddle his partner was dodging. He’s just about to gripe at the Red Paladin for speeding along at a gazelle’s pace when Keith suddenly skids to a stop.

Lance realizes when he slows his run and follows the boy’s stare that he’s been given a final, obnoxiously clear warning from the universe that there’s a problem, and that he is definitely the protagonist in a story that’s rapidly going downhill.

With a reverberating roar, the Red Lion of Voltron tears away from her perch in the trees and rockets into the atmosphere.


	2. These Kinds of Breakdowns Can't Be Swapped For Store Credit

‘Chaos’ is probably the best word for what’s going on in the Castle of Lions, but something about it is also very reminiscent of freshman orientation at the Galaxy Garrison, so a small part of Shiro actually feels completely at ease. The other chunk of him is just as anxious and lost as his teenage self had been that first school day.

“S’cuse me!” someone to his left shouts, at the same moment a gurney and three medics whoosh by on his right. He whips his hips sideways and snaps his arms to his sides to dodge both simultaneously, and twists his neck to watch the rush. The poor rebel on wheels is being skid around obstacles like a luger; one of the folks pushing the cart clips a hip on a chunk of metal and goes down himself. The hallway should be wide enough for everyone to pass easily, but apparently panic and upset has dissolved order in the ranks and sense in the troops. With a deep sigh, Shiro scans for something familiar and settles on bright yellow, leading him to Hunk, tall and broad in stature, ducked down against a wall with a canine-like alien. He dodges his way over, calling the boy’s name, but to his surprise Hunk holds up a finger and continues holding eye contact with his charge.

It’s apparent why the moment he’s within hearing distance; Hunk is gently speaking to the rebel and rubbing circles on her leg, eyebrows knit with concern as her chest heaves with shallow breaths. Her eyes are unfocused, staring out beyond Shiro’s legs, and her arms are curled up against her stomach, thick black nails digging into the thin fur of her paws. Shiro kneels, and Hunk simply says, “Panic attack.”

_In turmoil, provide simplistic command._

“Hunk, what’s her name?” Shiro says, voice firm and loud enough to mute the riot of noise in his ears. The Yellow Paladin is staring at him, but Shiro has wrapped his hands around the alien’s ankles in a sturdy, determined grip, and ignores him to glare straight at her face. 

“Hanna,” he responds, and Shiro nods before his teammate begins rambling in nervousness. There’s an audible clack as Hunk’s jaw snaps shut, and he leans back, arms still hovering, ready to assist.

“Hanna, look at me,” the Black Paladin commands, squeezing each ankle slowly and forcefully. “I’m here to help. Do as I say. Breathe in, slowly as you can. Now out.”

At first there’s very little reaction. This Shiro expects. He presses his grip into the rebel’s legs with each inhale, and eases off with each exhale, forcing his own breath into an audible volume for her to follow. The back of his mind tickles with the familiarity of the movement, threatening to throw him a reminder of the last reason he used the technique. His fingers dig a little tighter on the breath in, clutching into her bones, and with a start Hanna finally looks at him. 

“Good,” he says, “Keep going.”

She nods, gasping, and closes her watery eyes. Shiro continues his count, and they repeat the rhythm until even Hunk has gone a little glassy-eyed. It’s a good few dobashes before her shaking fingers unwind, but the moment they do Hunk takes one hand in both of his own and offers her a bright smile. She nods thankfully, leaning back into the wall, and Shiro sits back onto a leg himself. He allows a pause, a slow silence. He lets Hunk work his own anxiety out in petting the fur on the alien’s arm. Behind him the cacophony continues – another cart whizzes by, several rebels hoot in joy and begin to laugh with relief, Allura’s translator-generated accent rings like a bell in some kind of exasperated command – but the Black Paladin takes a moment for the energy around the three of them to settle, and to gather a deep calming lung inflation of his own.

‘Chaos’ is an extremely good word for what’s going on. The emotion in the room reverberates at the pitch of sirens, reaches at him like so many desperate hands drowning in a tar pit. At the same time, pockets of jubilation are building throughout the castle as lost squad members find each other again, as casualty counts refuse to climb. Neither he nor the other paladins have stopped since their lions docked, having scattered the moment the bay doors opened and found bastion points at which to start giving aid. But Hunk gives a soft reassurance into his helmet comm, smiling tenderly as Pidge’s voice barks back at him, and it comforts Shiro on the state of his team. At the very least, the kids are taking care of each other. He chances another look around the laneway in a search for their princess, because undoubtedly she’s standing solo as much as he is, a leader figure among upset masses, but catches only the wisp of her white hair turning a corner, and the echo of her voice lost in the crowd. 

He hasn’t seen Coran since before the battle, but knows the man to be holed up on the bridge, watching video feeds and offering direction to the hundreds of aliens present on where to put ships and bodies. The lounge downstairs has been converted into a medical bay. Millennia-old stretchers and blue-glowing aid devices have been pulled from where the cryopods are stationed to hold patients in stasis all over the building, until the current occupiers of said healing capsules have moved out. It’s clear the castle, despite its sleeping capacity, was not created with war in mind.

“How we doing?” he asks, turning back, and his companions smile in response, both looking exhausted. Hanna is wiping at her long snout with her free hand; Hunk’s eyes are equally misty, and he gives her hand a squeeze before curling into himself with a sigh. It’s endlessly fascinating to Shiro how the Yellow Paladin offers empathy, how he provides unabashed and unending support for those around him, and yet never wavers in standing and conjuring a whole new burst of energy as soon as needed. He takes only a brief respite before he’s turning to Shiro with a set jaw and ready posture. 

“Pidge is taking care of repairs, Matt said the medical situation is pretty much under control – which is good, because I don’t think I’d be very good helping with that, I’m squeamish around blood... oh, and I think Allura’s going into a conference with the other Coalition leaders to tell them what’s going on?” Hunk’s eyes dart sideways for a moment as a voice chirps into his comm. “Yeah, thanks, Coran. Basically everybody’s found a spot to do something, and word got in a minute ago that all the ships that’re coming back are here. So we’re… as good as we’re gonna get, I guess.”

“Nice work,” the Black Paladin says, and the moment he rests a hand on Hunk’s shoulder the boy melts, but his ease quickly shifts back into tension, and he murmurs, “What’re we gonna do, Shiro? That’s three bases in this part of the galaxy down.”

_In unease, decide._

“How many empty rooms do you think this place has, Hunk?” The boy lights up at the question, his fingers tapping out a quick multiplication on his thumb. He does a sudden glance at the mess of movement around them, eyebrows knotting in thought.

“Rounding down, I’m gonna say a couple hundred. The rooms on the bottom floor must have been serving quarters when the castle was still on Altea, because they’re half the size of ours, but they’ve also got four times the beds, kinda like the first year dorms at the Garrison.” He bites his lip a moment, looking uneasy. “I could probably build a couple bunks using scrap metal from the downed ships, if we took the lions out on a quick collection run.”

“Hold off on that until we know the galra have moved on, but good thought.”

“Then we’re looking at fifty-ish rooms with one bed and lots of floorspace. Er– forty… eight. Not those two.” Shiro doesn’t argue, knowing that the rooms of the absent paladins are one of the few markers left that they existed here at all. He’s seen Hunk running fingers over Lance’s door in the same way Pidge solicitously brushes the photo of her family when she feels no one is looking, and he doesn’t have the heart to take that from him, however logistically unreasonable. Forty-eight rooms is more than enough. “Bottom floor has maybe a hundred, and there’re a couple weird ones with slopey ceilings in the spires. Uh, but Shiro, I’m not sure the auxiliary power even goes to those. We kinda rerouted a bunch of stuff after the reboot we did on the castle a month ago. Remember? The shield was fried by that ion cannon and we lost the artificial grav in the upper west wing? Coran said it wasn’t important, so we just sectioned it off.”

“Well,” Shiro says slowly, holding his chin, “If we’re going to move the rebel forces into the castle, we’ll have to open it back up. We’re gonna need all the space we can get.”

“Plenty outside,” Hanna chips in, startling the paladins. She crosses her legs, back straightening and gaze turning firm. “You’ll have all the assistance you need, I promise you that. It would be a great relief to the rebel forces to have a place to rest and recoup.”

Shiro needs only to nod his thanks and consent before Hunk and Hanna are hashing out details and floor plans, so he leaves them to it. He knows his leadership is bound to be desired elsewhere; a quick chirp to Coran on the comms might cover all the large problems at hand, but the castle is shaking with the movement of hundreds of rebels-turned-refugees, and that alone means work for the Voltron leader. As if on cue, there’s a beep through his helmet and a tense but cheerful voice saying, “Heads up, Number One, I need a quick tic off the relay to talk to the Lucronian ambassador – not so happy a fellow, having his asteroid base blown up, but that’s love and interstellar war for you, isn’t it? I told him you wouldn’t mind taking charge of the lines, so brace yourself for three– no, sorry, four incoming chin-wags and a steady call with the princess, although she’s talking strategy right now so I doubt she’ll be very chatty on your end. Best luck, my boy!”

Shiro has become familiar enough with Coran’s spur-of-the-moment decisions at this point in their relationship to know there’s no use in protesting or asking questions to a dead line, so he takes a breath instead and backs himself against a wall in preparation for half a dozen reports and inquiries. It’s only a second before he’s got two beeps signalling waiting calls. The first is from the medical bay, a slow status update from the long-eared alien in charge of surgery, who assures him that their casualty count remains at zero and that the worst injury they’ve seen was a couple of missing fingers from a fellow with twice as many digits as humans to begin with. 

“Some kind of miracle, the crowds are saying. Lucky, very interesting, I am saying. Perhaps luck may change, but I am happy for no critical injuries. Continued luck to you, paladin, I am saying.”

“And to you, doctor,” Shiro replies, adding, “Uh, I am saying.”

The second call comes from Pidge, with a following video feed of the side of her face, the image warped slightly by the curve of his helmet. She’s not exactly smiling, but there’s a glimmer in her eyes as they dart around the room, searching and cataloging, an expression that betrays her enjoyment of the chaos and her role in reining it in, and her fingers are flying across a holopad as if they possessed their own sentience. She babbles an inventory list to him so quickly that Shiro could swear she switches languages in the middle for all he’s understanding, then throws in some Altean words, ostensibly to mess with him. The Black Paladin has to beg her to stop when she starts explaining how she had rigged the hangar door to individualize and count items as they were flown in. Pidge rolls her eyes at him, a picture of teenage exasperation on a genius he has no idea how Commander Holt ever handled, then swipes him a text file of everything she’s just said and assures him that Coran’s been sent a simultaneous copy, sparing Shiro the concentrated effort of figuring out how to forward messages through his eyeshield. 

The third call pops up the second Pidge disconnects, and for a moment Shiro thinks something’s glitched out and he’s looking at the same person, but as soon as the caller turns to face the camera and a wide grin blooms across his face, it’s obvious he’s just tripped into another case of Holt Confusion. 

“Takashi!” Matt says, fumbling and then dropping the scrap metal he’s holding with a loud clang. He stares down at it for a minute and sighs. “Did I get the wrong number? Not that it’s not great to see you, but I thought I hit the connection for the bridge.”

“This is the operator, how may I direct your call?” 

“You’re lucky I understand that century-old reference, and I highly suggest you never use it on anyone else. Especially given that we’re the only species I’ve run into so far who ever had electromagnetic pulse-based communication systems. Can I just leave a memo with you, then, or are you patching me through to Coran?”

“The former, for now. The Lucronian fellow in charge of the rebel base wanted to speak with him.”

“That bag of hot air has been getting in everyone’s way since this all went down,” Matt says, holding up a finger in warning for the noise he creates kicking all the metal he’s dropped out of the middle of the hallway. “Word is he was more of a figurehead than anyone important to the alliance. Olia gave most of the command remotely, and her cousin Hanna was more or less in charge.”

“We’ve met.”

Matt nods, “Not the strongest in combat, but Othu wasn’t an attack base to begin with. She’s been key in a lot of our strategic defense planning throughout this system. She’s okay, then?”

Shiro nods, and with a couple of cautionary glances moves himself farther away from the main corridor where the chatter and movement are a bit more muted. The title of loudest sibling between the Holts absolutely doesn’t go to Matt; he’s quieter even than the gentle Yellow Paladin in most situations, and though their trip to Kerberos years ago was short, it was more than enough time for Shiro to learn that telling him to speak up only lasted so long. Besides, there’s a soothing quality to Matt’s speech that, coupled with the relatively lesser din of this new hallway, is helping lower Shiro’s anxiety. He silences the ringing of an incoming call and with a wave of his hand reroutes it to Hunk.

“I wasn’t sure how things were gonna look after the base hit their distress beacon, ‘cause a lot of the folks stationed there were more of the passive rebels, the ones that couldn’t or didn’t want to fight. It was a pretty sheltered chunk of rock, right? Out of the way, shadowed by a moon, lightyears from the closest occupied planet. I have no idea how or why they were targeted.”

“We’ll get some of our intel on it as soon as things calm down.”

“And by intel you mean my sister?”

“Pidge has a giant mystical robot lion to pilot. I can’t be wrong in assuming your team has plenty of talented investigators, Matthew.”

“You’ve got me there.” There’s a long sigh through the audio as Matt finds a spot against a wall and leans back, and some jostling as he repositions the camera. There’s been a lot of talk about reconfiguring – or rebuilding – the communication tech most of the rebels are carrying, as it’s old or has otherwise been constructed out of whatever they could find, but between missions and sudden strikes at hidden bases neither coalition team has had much free time. Shiro begins pacing the empty room he’s found, subconscious mind running through all the things left to handle and rebuild, too restless to make like his friend and take a breather. He catches Matt watching him. “I take it the rest of the coalition is still busy?”

“Proverbial headless chickens,” Shiro confirms, scratching his neck, “I haven’t spoken to Allura since we brought the lions back in, but from what I’ve heard all of the surrounding free planets are scrambling to build their own defenses, and communication hasn’t been the greatest through the debris field. Between the three bases we’ve lost we’ve got ten leaders on board, and they’re all looking for answers.”

“The castle’s getting quiet over here, if it helps. You guys need a hand on that side?”

“Yes. Hard yes. Put another pizza on my tab in premature thanks.”

“That’s getting to be a long tab, Takashi.” Matt leans his arms over his bent knees and props his chin upon them, voice softening farther and smile going broad. “I’ll be shitting pure oregano within a week of landing back on Earth.”

“You’re saying no to free pizza? Who are you and what have you done with Matthew Holt?”

“I’m saying you’ll either owe me tomato paste pie until we’re old and grey or you’re binging each and every one with me. Or both.” A small window appears on Shiro’s holoscreen next to the video feed, full of hand-drawn tally marks, and as Matt scribbles on his own screen a new line appears on the pop up. A beep and light blinking on his arm distracts the rebel leader, and as his fingers begin typing a reply to the message he adds, “Feel free to force some of your share on Keith, but there’ll be more than enough to repeat grad night at the Garrison and make us all sick.”

Shiro swallows hard. He tries to force a laugh, but the sound is squashed in the tight muscles of his throat. Matt swipes away the extra screens distracting him and glances up, and his expression falls. 

“Shiro?” he asks, eyebrows furrowing, “Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah. Pidge is in the hangar. If she can’t use your help then Hunk and Hanna can. Shiro out.” He cuts the connection before Matt’s motion forward or call of his name fully finish, rubbing a hand over his face. Everything through his chest to his forehead feels constricted. It’s wild how easily the Red Paladin’s name throws him off balance and takes the wind from his lungs. It’s not as though Shiro hasn’t spent every free moment throwing ideas at the wall and, increasingly, consulting with Pidge over ways to fix the absence, but names are never dropped. Hearing the words from someone else’s mouth drudges up all kinds of unfortunate memories and feelings that have sweat beading at his temples.

_In difficulty, divert, distract, and dissuade._

His usual tactic is to find something else to focus on, anything from an important Voltron-related task to a hangnail he can pick at. Several abandoned wings of the castle have been discreetly repaired during team breaks, for example. There’s a corner of Shiro’s room graffitied with oil and a bright blue pigment gifted to him on a rescued planet by an elderly royal who may have been trying to woo him. (He did his best to create a portrait of the Black Lion, but Shiro has never been an artist – cave paintings came to mind when he thought to describe it.) Another layer of word association-based thought starts spiraling through his upset head, wondering about places he could go and things he could do that would be helpful to the current castle situation but devoid of people. There’s certainly a rub when it comes to being the man in charge, and a lack of solitude when there are questions being asked is it. Shiro’s traitorous feet have just started towards the lions’ hangar, aiming to fly Black into the wreckage to collect scrap, when sudden loud panting directly behind him startles him and sends his nerves into overdrive.

He turns on a dime, heel pivoting and prosthetic arm lit and glowing, and in the space of a second the Black Paladin has caught someone by the shirt front in his less dangerous hand and has the weaponized one a flick away from lethality. Coran screeches in a pitch nearing ultrasound and freezes into perfect stillness.

“H-hello there, my boy, lovely day to not be maimed, isn’t it?”

Carefully, so as not to set off his adrenaline-based twitch response, Shiro backs up, spreading his hands wide and away. Coran pulls the collar of his tunic back down, subtly brushing at his neck where the purple energy of the galra-developed prosthetic arm has singed the stubble of hair. He and the older man exhale loudly and slowly together, looking each other over in silent questioning, and when the terseness of the air settles, he cheerfully continues, “Excellent to see you, Shiro, honestly. You haven’t, by chance, seen anyone else come by here? No, err, tall, Lucronian-looking folks?” He glances back over his shoulders and hunches forward slightly, as if trying to shrink himself from potentially watching eyes.

“Are you looking for him, or he for you?” Shiro asks, bemused and throwing himself headfirst into Coran’s theatrics in a desperate attempt to calm his panic. He folds his arms across his chest to stifle their shaking. “I don’t remember you calling and telling me your meeting was over. Should I let him know where you are?”

“No! No, no, that’s quite alright, Number One,” comes the quick reply, and Coran takes another nervous glance towards either end of the hallway, twiddling his fingers together. “We’ve had, ah, a rather an extensive chat and I’m _quite_ sure he’s gotten the point by now. There’s only so many ways one can reiterate what a shim-shamble the castle is in and how very little we all know about what’s going on.”

“How’s the princess been handling the rest of the delegates?”

“With all the usual tactics of politics and fisticuffs, of course: dodging, weaving, distraction, flashy costume and special effects.” Apparently assured that the surrounding area shows no sign of immediate threat, the older man stands straight and brushes the shoulders and sleeves of his uniform. He has more light-coloured dirt across them than a jaunt through the ship would normally offer; the matching herd of dustbunnies on his abdomen suggests he very well could have wiggled his way through the ventilation shafts during his daring escape. Shiro wouldn’t have put it past him. He doesn’t realize Coran’s giving him a rather piercing look until he speaks again. “I’ve got a thought, lad, follow me, would you? And fill me in on the status of the rest of our motley crew – I haven’t been able to answer any communications since I fled- er, left the ambassador.”

He turns on a heel and gives Shiro a friendly shoulder pat before taking off down the quiet hallway. It’s a space they’re both more or less familiar with, though this section of the castle isn’t part of the main route most of the paladins use. Coran, from what he understands, practically grew up in this massive vessel, whereas Shiro has simply spent many a night wandering it when sleep was unfriendly. He knows the fork to the left leads up to a dome-shaped viewing platform that he’s repeatedly found Ke… well, he’s found people dozing off in at ridiculous hours of night there. He also knows there’s a communication station built into the alcove ahead that doesn’t like his galra tech arm at all. (Luckily for him, it was Coran who had found him sitting on the floor in the cylindrical holobarrier, and had kept quiet about the incident, however funny a story it might be.) To his surprise, however, there’s yet another quirk to this area that has never been mentioned to or discovered by him; he can’t help but to peek curiously over the older man’s shoulder as Coran sweeps his hand over a nondescript section of wall and, suddenly, a six foot chunk of it disappears.

They step through the new doorway silently, but it takes only a short, “Oh,” of wonder from Shiro to invoke a broad mustached grin and flourish as Coran starts his explanation for what they’re looking at. The room around them is tall but narrow, and completely round, ribbed in bookshelves holding actual books. What looks like a Balmeran crystal the size of a man’s chest juts from the ceiling and bathes the room in a surprisingly warm light, and underneath it is a long white desk with a chair that sits reclined back, as if its resident had been napping in it moments ago. There’s another, smaller chair with a built in desk facing the same direction as the large one, and in a far corner what looks like building blocks stacked in the same shape as the castleship. The door behind them slides shut.

“Welcome to Alfor’s study,” Coran says, twirling his mustache between two fingers and sounding more than a bit pleased with himself. He waves a hand at the small desk as he flops into the chair of the larger; Shiro hesitantly sets his weight down onto the table portion of it, certain that if he were to force more than a single leg in the chair space he’d be inexorably trapped and need rescue for a second time. “One of the more luxurious parts of the ship, if I do say so myself, and an excellent place to avoid detection. As you may have noticed, it’s also the last remaining vestige for ancient Altean scripture, though I wouldn’t suggest pulling anything off the shelves, as it’s very possible they’ll crumble to powder.”

“I had no idea this was here,” Shiro replies, too surprised to stop himself from stating the obvious.

“Wouldn’t be much of a secret room if every paladin in the place had seen it! You’re one of very few, my boy, past and present. Princess Allura spent a lot of time here as a child – why, I taught her everything I knew of diplomatics and faster-than-light crystal-generated ion thrust when she was just a wee thing, sitting at that desk. Wasn’t the most attentive student, but certainly an astute one! Ahh, I do miss those days. Feels like just quintents ago we were breaking up mathematics lectures with piloting lessons, holding on for dear life as the young princess nearly drove a cargo ship into a _thrassac_ shrub…”

“I have no doubt she was a quick learner, Coran. She’s taken to the blue lion like a fish to water.”

“Or a _porthak_ to magma! Allura’s always been gifted, of course, she’s Alfor’s daughter, but she’s forever had the talent and grace of an official twice her years. If her father had been even a fraction as put together as Allura was at eighty-six, really–”

“Hang on,” Shiro starts, leaning forward and nearly toppling as the desk below him shifts, “Allura’s eighty-six years old?”

“Not at all, my boy, she’ll be two hundred and fourteen a few pheobs from now! Err, I think a few pheobs. We’ve been in and out of so many planets’ solar cycles that I’ve rather lost track…”

“Coran,” the Black Paladin says, forehead cradled in his prosthetic hand, “That would make the princess more than eight times my age. There’s no way that’s correct.” 

“Well,” comes the startled reply, and when the two men make eye contact there’s a long pause. Coran comes out of his reclined seat to rest his elbows on the long white desk, steepling his fingers and giving Shiro a pitying look. “Dare I ask the average lifespan of a human?”

“With the help of current medical technology, a hundred. There’ve been a few rich folks who’ve pushed that to as far as a hundred forty, but their quality of life wasn’t great. Historically, a human generation was fifty years.”

“By the binary stars, that’s horrible.” The redheaded man takes a slow inhale, as if steeling himself to say, “Are you– you must be almost through, then, are you, lad?”

Shiro can’t help the laugh that bubbles up through his chest, nor the way it grips his ribs and refuses to die down even as the colour of Coran’s face begins to match his bright hair. He’s mostly been able to answer the questions of his alien allies in space with patience and composure up until now, but there’s something especially funny about the older man asking him, after all the battles he’s been through, after the amputation of his arm, the multiple concussions, the post-traumatic stress, after even the chronic illness that he launched himself up to Kerberos afflicted with if it was old age that was near overdue to take him out. True, the white in his hair would seem telling more of time and stress to another human, and he’s sure he’s doubled the amount of wrinkles around his eyes and tripled the dark circles under them since fronting an interstellar war. And certainly, he’s matured far quicker than even the training for a trip to the moons of a dwarf planet was meant to demand of him. But he grips the edges of the desk and doubles over, chest at his knees, winded and wheezing and grin spread so wide his cheeks hurt, and chuckles, “Coran, I’m _twenty-five.”_

“There is a bit of variation between an Altean decapheob and an Earthling year, of course,” the advisor huffs, folding arms over his chest and biting a smile back, amused despite his embarrassment, “But that’s still a quarter of your lifespan, Number One! Can’t say I expected you were so young, you’ve got the moxie of a good middle-aged Altean general, if I do say so myself–”

Shiro can’t help himself cracking up all over again, though to his credit Coran joins in the laughter when the child’s desk he’s been leaning so heavily on pitches forward and dumps him unceremoniously onto the floor. He rolls onto his back and presses his palms against his forehead, blocking out the room, and chortles until his stomach begins to hurt and saltwater begins prickling at his eyes. He can hear Coran moving about the room as they both regain composure; he starts paying attention to the world around him again when a cool glass container taps his arm. He finds the older man sitting cross-legged with his back against the larger table and a glittering clear crystal tea set laid out between them. He pours them each a cup of what looks like liquid opal and takes a healthy sip.

“Just fascinating, really, how similar you humans look to alteans and yet how very different we are. Humour me, Shiro, because I’d truly just assumed until now – are all the other paladins younger than you?”

“Yeah,” he responds breathlessly, scrubbing a hand through his hair to brush away the tingles of hysteria that flavoured his last few chuckles. “Sorry. Yes, I’m the eldest of the paladins. Pidge is the youngest. Commander Holt repeatedly showed me photos of his family on our Kerberos flight and called her the smartest child in a generation. She was fourteen then, maybe fifteen now. Matthew is a few years older. I imagine Hunk and Lance are about his age.” 

Coran is watching him carefully; Shiro takes a less than classy shot of the nunvil before him, cringes as the unidentifiable flavour glosses its way down his throat and numbs his entire neck like a swig of procaine, and uses the reaction to hide the pain of adding, “Keith is almost twenty.”

“I’d be right to say they’re all children, then?”

“Close enough to it. Honestly, I’d thought Princess Allura was right around the same age.”

“Not entirely wrong, my boy,” Coran says softly, tracing the rim of his glass with a finger until the crystal begins to sing. “I don’t go telling everyone this, but I’m a touch over six hundred, and by altean accounts I’m, well, just a little older than I thought you were. We’ve been known to last fifteen hundred decapheobs, and that was with technology from several millennia ago. If my people had survived and prospered until now, I can only imagine.” He hums. “Hundreds of years of difference in age, and yet so minuscule the difference in appearance from your adolescent humans to our alteans. Curious.”

“It must be something, living for centuries.”

“Has its perks. Has its pitfalls too. Alteans have always been cordial with other species, and not all our friends live as long.” He pauses, tapping his glass on the floor. “Does make a man concerned for our stranded boys, I must say. I’d rather not think of them living out such a short lifespan on an uninhabited planet, especially with only each other for company. They’re not the most, err, reconcilable paladins.” 

Shiro’s stomach lurches, clenching around the plasmatic drink he’s introduced to it. He sets his own cup down with as much care as he can manage and tucks his tight fists away where they might be less noticeable. He’s never counted Coran as an especially observant fellow, given his theatrics and penchant for being scatterbrained, but he supposes there’s credit due given his age and time spent around so many different kinds of beings in that time. Hunk may be the most empathetic of their lot, but Coran has a gregarious personality, and it makes him easy to trust. When the older man gives his elbow a gentle squeeze and pours him another round, he lets loose the nervous sigh prickling his chest, and admits, “We still don’t have a plan. All these sudden rebel base attacks are another thing we don’t know how to handle. The team needs leadership but I… really don’t know where to point them.” He groans quietly, letting his head hang. “Thank you for the nunvil, Coran, but in all honesty I would love a hard drink.”

“Not sure I follow, lad. Are there solid beverages on your planet? Quite certain I’ve never seen anything like that.” 

Shiro chuckles despite himself and explains, “Alcohol, I mean. Not something I’m particularly supposed to have, but it’s a go-to for folks in hard times. Both a celebratory drink and a crutch.” 

“You have… alcohols… in celebration. Shiro, my boy, I may not be an expert on human biology but I feel perhaps this is a contributor to your short life spans. By the Ruptonian moons, that’s the sort of thing primitive nations have used as fuel for their ground-to-sky vehicles!”

Shiro toasts his glass towards the air in a nonverbal _Hey, us too_ to whatever species Coran’s referring, and downs his drink in a single gulp. The liquid doesn’t burn like a tequila or warm his chest like a splash of rum, but he pretends the indescribable glossiness of the drink is as satisfying as the knowledge of imminent drunkenness would be. It instead sparks enthusiasm in his anxiety and has everything inside of him cinching up. Coran gives him a concerned couple of whacks on the back as he coughs the offending tightness from his lungs and presses his own hand to his sternum. 

“I was King Alfor’s right hand man for everything,” the elder man says slowly, “He was an extremely capable fellow – ran a small empire, kept the peace as a paladin, still made time for his family… and you know, he managed those things even after the rise of the Galra Empire. Long hours were spent in this room going over treaties and armistices, consulting holomaps of battlefields and planning tactics. Alfor never did have a free moment.” Coran doesn’t move other than to gaze nostalgically across the bookshelves. He takes a sharp inhale. “Sometimes, though, between those endless tasks, we had to make space. More often than not it was I who had to talk him into it. You see, Number One, leaders are always working for their people, and tend to overwork and overlook themselves.”

Shiro withers at what Coran is implying, feeling small in the sudden realization of how much of a child he must be to a man generations older than he is. An argument works its way into his mouth, indignant, prepared to explain how ready he is to lead, how someone has to and like hell is he putting that pressure on the kids, how Allura can’t be a single bastion of strength especially now that their castle is hosting hundreds more residents. But he can’t conjure the words, regardless of the amount of times he’s recited them to the reflective portholes of the ship. 

‘Chaos’ is a word that not only covers the atmosphere of the castle, nor the mess the paladins have found themselves in without a red lion. It fits the description of Shiro’s nerves, of the emotions he’s been suppressing in order to take care of his team. It titles the dreams that have been plaguing him in between his usual nightmares of galran ships and bone-cutting lasers, ones where he watches an aerocycle pitch off a cliff into an endless void and take an adolescent Keith with it. There is as much the knowledge in him that he needs help as there is a want to hide it.

_In adversity, seek strength outside yourself._

Coran asks the same thing his fiancé used to, staring him down with a finality that takes ‘no’ as an unacceptable answer. It’s a request as much as it is a command, a show of solidarity and a promise of judgeless audience. It’s been a very long time since Shiro has let anyone take care of him, and he may not be personally close with the princess’ advisor, but war has a way of pushing allies into crevices in a person’s vulnerability. He glances between the two desks, minute and grand, daring himself to believe he can avoid the larger and climb back into the coddled space of a child. He finds instead that he’s firmly between the two.

The hand on his shoulder is solid. The smile fixed at him is warm. The knowing look from Coran’s blue eyes are so reminiscent of Shiro’s grandfather’s that homesickness suckerpunches any weak rationalization right out of his lungs. He leans forward to scrub his face into his shaking hands, taking a slow breath, and ultimately begins with, “I know they’re capable but, Coran, it’s been _months.”_


	3. Through Mathematics or Movement All Things Can Speak

Katherine “Katie/Pidge” Holt is more than used to being taken for granted.

It comes with the territory for a genius, she figures, and if she were emotionally intuitive perhaps people’s behavior around and towards her would be easily explained, and inherently less rude than it feels. She’s tried, of course, to analyze behavioural traits of the one relying on her, conducted extensive studies on physical tics and the supposed emotions those movements betray. The personnel files she keeps on her fellow paladins aren’t exclusively for strategic planning – there are entire sections detailing Lance’s inability to stand still and Coran’s nervous foot-tapping, among a hundred other “words” of body language she’s attempted to qualify. She’s done her best to understand the conduct, in as many ways as she knows how. But the fact of it is, Pidge has a brain meant for numbers and objective concepts, not the vague interpersonal subjects of sociology and kinesics.

She’s not fond of the way those point-form comments clog up her otherwise cohesive reports, either, conveying information she’s near-certain won’t be useful on a battlefield or in regards to building alliances. They certainly haven’t been helpful in her most recent (unending, exhausting) venture. Still, she’s loath to delete anything; experience and advice from her father have very firmly pressed the idea into her head that all data is good data, in the right circumstance.

She types out another note on the Blue Paladin’s file, something mundane about his repeat checks on mana levels and companion creature stats every time he’s played _Killbot Phantasm_ on the retro gaming system he’d begged her to hook up, and sighs. 

It feels like reaching, at this point. She’s been writing endless lists of character traits on her missing teammates, marched around the castle at all hours surveying rooms and making hypotheses on the different mechanisms available to her for rescue. She’s interviewed every rebel staying here and every refugee using the ship as a midway house, and logged their words and identities away in yet another database inside her buffed-up computer (or at least had until Matt explained that she was stressing out the more unstable asylum-seekers). She’s grilled the onboard Alteans on every bit of tech in the building (including the waste-management systems, to Coran’s dismay). Most frequently, she’s run numbers. Pidge has seen the equations for orbital resonance and Schwarzschild metric so many times she’s certain they’re laser-burnt onto the lenses of her eyes. When she does rest, she sleeps in fits and wakes repeatedly to write notes into the hand-bound book an artisan on Olkarion had given her, only to find in the morning that her stress-addled brain hasn’t relayed anything helpful at all.

But in her defense, nobody else is doing a dang thing.

Pidge is used to being thrown under the metaphorical bus, and she’s more or less stopped being frustrated at the people around her for not offering their aid. Honestly, her hubris won’t even let her ask for help after hearing, “She’s got it handled,” a certain number of times. She’s a special level of intelligent, she knows this, and she’s always come up with an answer to whatever problem-of-the-week the team is experiencing eventually. It’s a track record she’s carried through antagonism-filled years of public school and the Garrison, and taking the title of Paladin of The Green Lion certainly hasn’t lowered the general expectation of intellectual excellence. She’s been left to figure out the biggest and most complicated issue facing Team Voltron to date by herself simply because everyone else believes it’ll be no sweat for her to work out an answer. 

Hunk – ridiculous, generous Hunk – has been an exception to the rule. Which isn’t to say he hasn’t mostly left the math to Pidge – because he thinks he’ll be a hindrance, which is a disservice to his abilities, in her firm opinion – but more than once she’s found some new concoction of peanut butter-esque baked deliciousness laid out on a cleared patch of the workshop table waiting for her, because eating whilst focusing is not her strongest habit. Among pages of interview transcripts, all handwritten in his blocky capslock style and stacked next to the plate, he’ll have added some note pleading for her feedback on the food. Sometimes it’s scribbled in English, but more often Altean, or, in one admittedly endearing instance, a string of C++ code. She may have forgotten about the food on multiple occasions after digging into the paperwork from his (gentler) talks with the castleship traffic, but it hasn’t seemed to deter his efforts.

Today appears to be a quiet day for the entire team, though, including Hunk. It feels like the aftermath of a holiday, where even into the hours of the castle’s fabricated afternoon there’s a dozy stillness in the air. Three of the four rebel squadrons are away, the last of the Irthiisian émigrés were relocated yesterday, and last she checked Shiro is actually sleeping, which by unwritten rule means even the mice dare not stir. Pidge’s nature – and the ever present fear of time – has convinced her to open up her laptop and get back to work, but even her brain seems to be falling to the thrall of the atmosphere. The words on the screen are reaching her eyes and then getting jumbled in her neurons; even the numbers, equal in every language of Earth (and, by her determination, easily translated from Altean numerical symbols) are traitors and not mentally computing. It takes her a while to realize that that’s because it’s not just the weird energy of the day that has her thoughts in a chokehold, but a second, screaming input.

Something perceptible.

Pidge isn’t an especially intuitive person. Not in the way that psychics and the religious are – she can’t take an easily explained somatic reaction to stimuli like goosebumps and choose to believe they’re the cause of something that can’t be captured. Anything can be exposed, given the right study or applied mathematics, even Altean magic. (It’s based in quintessence, the living molecular vibration and shifting in all things, restructured from the initial force of the Big Bang and channelled through– well, she might not have it _all_ figured out, but there’s a likelihood that certain advanced humanoids can manipulate energy with specific areas of their brains.) She’s never been one to give power to mysteries, choosing instead to follow their most logical cause and disassemble it. Point being, her sudden inability to read and the prickles at the back of her neck probably aren’t some spook, but a gigantic sentient space lion trying to get her attention.

She folds down her laptop and shoves it under an arm, padding down the hallway in her socked feet because she’s not interested in searching for her shoes. The tickling at her spine doesn’t exactly stop, but changes, moving from something like a itch to a full blown wall of force at her back, giving her a directional shove. It’s unlike anything she’s ever felt from her lion or its greater conglomerate, and yet it doesn’t frighten her in the least. Curiosity instead motivates her into a jog, and despite knowing how sound travels she asks, “Is that you, girl?”

The energy behind her becomes one ingrained in her ribs, form-fit to the back of her skeleton and rumbling like a small earthquake. It sends all the hair on her body into a stand and her blood running hot, and a glance in a reflective silver panel on the castle’s wall confirms her face has gone bright red. Whether it’s the puppeting effect on her body or her self-created enthusiasm that makes her grin is a moot point; Pidge breaks into a full out run and breathlessly confirms, “I’m listening! Speak up!”

She dashes through the halls with an ebullience neither she nor the team have felt in ages, mind running at its own quick pace, asking layers of questions and logging details. Her body seems to know more easily than her brain which direction she’s meant to be going, so she lets her feet fly and the magnetic pull tug her around winding corners and through multiple sets of airlocks. The urgency doesn’t ebb when she finds herself in front of the largest hangar in the ship, the one just big enough to house all five lions at once, used most often for show or maintenance. But Pidge slows, straining past her hammering heart to make out the words of a soft voice echoing through the chamber.

It’s Allura, ostensibly, since there are no other people on the ship with clearance to be so close to the lions that have such a recognisable accent (though that’s the work of the castle translator doing its best to harmonize a formal archaic language with a relatively young, slangy one). She peeks around the corner. Pidge can’t judge when she finds the princess standing at the foot of the blue lion, one hand resting against a massive metal claw and murmuring up at her, not where Pidge has been careening this way on the mere sensation of contact from her own lion. Neither robot seems especially active, though. Blue’s eyes are unlit and she stands at a still, proud attention. 

“Father was much more… adroit in choosing his alliances. He seemed to have an innate sense of who to trust. Well, perhaps… barring the obvious.” Allura leans against the huge paw, rubbing at her face. “There’s a great difference in believing someone and working with them. He does make a convincing pitch, but…”

“Princess?” The young woman turns abruptly, hands pressed to her chest as if keeping her lungs from fleeing her startled breath. She relaxes a touch when she registers it’s Pidge at the doorway, and waves her in. “Everything okay?”

“Well enough, thank you. What brings you to this corner of the castle?”

The green lion seems to take this as her cue. With a low rumble that startles both paladins and a sudden movement that makes Allura shriek in surprise, the robot comes to undeniable life, rising into her feet and roaring. Pidge can feel her eyes growing wide at the display. There’s always been an aspect of the lions that has remained mystical no matter what theoretical science she threw at them – how did they react so innately to stimuli when they should be entirely technological? Were their personalities a result of human and altean anthropomorphization or a genuine attribute? – and the complete autonomy that has the green lion walking towards them with all the natural grace of a live cat is displaying a good hundred more reasons to be baffled. She glances at Allura for input, but the princess seems just as stunned. 

“Um,” Pidge breathes, resisting the urge to run as the energy clinging to her spine pushes itself towards her skull and the giant robot leans her face in close enough to brush noses, “Hey.”

The electric grip her lion has on her body explodes under her skin, wrapping what feels like every possible crevice of her nervous system in jabbing needles. Her ears become plugged full of static; she grabs at them reflexively, ducking away and falling backwards onto her behind. She doesn’t realize she’s shouting until Allura’s iron grip pries her wrists away and the metaphorical volume dial is cranked down. 

“Pidge! Pidge, are you alright?!”

“What was that?!” she gasps, as indignant as she is startled. She leans around the princess to stare her lion in the eye, angrily adding, “What’s your problem?!” The robot groans in response, stepping yet closer until her feet are pillars on either side of Allura. She dips her massive head down, seemingly trying for round two, but Pidge slaps her hands upward and pushes against the silver of her nose for all its worth. “Don’t you dare! Whatever you’re doing, it’s not working.” 

Allura more or less collapses on the floor, tumbling sideways and holding herself up with an arm. They both stare up at the lioness, whose eyes are flickering, and she murmurs, “Incredible. What is this?”

“She’s trying to… tell me something? I think?” Pidge replies, digging a pinky into her ear in an attempt to clear the fuzzy sensation plaguing them. The tingling along her spine has become more of an insistent dull poking, though the hair on her arms is still standing on end from the static. She feels a bit as though she’s stuck her fingers in a wall socket. An analogous thought strikes her. “Wait, princess, how does communication between the lions and paladins work? What are they using when they show us what they want?”

“I’m… honestly not certain. There are aspects of Voltron that even my father wasn’t able to explain, methods by which it functions that go beyond common altean magic. I suppose they communicate using something like emotion, which they convey by channelling quintessence. They use the power to convert code to something biological that we can understand.”

“So if they’re trying to tell us too much at once, or don’t have enough quintessence to work with, there’s a translation error,” Pidge says, excitement building. Her lion rumbles at her, as if lauding the suggestion. Allura’s mouth falls into a tidy O of realization.

“Or your quintessence isn’t in sync,” she adds, holding up a finger. “Bonds between paladins strengthen their instincts and faith in one other, but bonds between paladins and their lions run at a much more profound level. They can directly interact with your quintessence and manipulate it, if you let them.”

In the four years since The Accident and affiliated loss of the right arm of Voltron, the paladins have spent a much greater percentage of time in their associated coloured robot limbs. It’s been an inevitability – the civilizations in need have noticed an absence of their superweapon as much as the galra have realized a sudden ease in their cosmic domination, and where the team has lacked in power they’ve had to make up in persistence. The handicap has put the entire coalition at a massive disadvantage, and burdened the wider masses of rebels and soldiers from liberated planets; what used to be a simple act of forming a titan and eliminating a threat has become instead a massive interstellar game of chess. It occurs to Pidge, suddenly, that they may have been using the lions as pawns where they ought to be dynamic pieces.

“I don’t speak her language, but if we work together I can learn,” she hisses, reaching back out to take the green lion’s massive jaw in hand. The robot doesn’t move, but the electricity under her skin becomes frantic and warm, zipping from deep inside her chest and crackling where her fingertips meet cool metal. She closes her eyes, clearing away the thrilled thoughts that are doing laps in her skull and focusing intently on her lion. “Okay. I’m listening, girl. Just start with something small.”

The idea that her lion wants to speak to her in a vernacular that has no true Rosetta Stone for her to translate by holds a fascination Pidge can barely contain. The tickling energy flies along her arms and bursts at her fingertips, tracing through pathways of nerves and hitching rides on the cells of her blood, and she wonders at the format of speech. Does her lion talk in binary code? In chemical signals? Through radio or electromagnetic waves? It doesn’t seem to matter, because whatever she’s trying to convey finds the frontal gyrus of her brain and lays out a ‘word’ in a matter of seconds. But as with all subjective experiences, explaining the sensation isn’t easy. The two halves of her brain understand the world in completely different contexts, and without an auditory input or a base of reference they’re struggling to decipher the new concept put upon them. She scrunches her face, desperately willing something she can comprehend to trap itself in the woodwork of the headache she can feel coming on; Pidge can feel Allura staring at her, and grimaces.

“It’s… a small burst,” she tries, “Like when your limb falls asleep. An… uncomfortable feeling. Makes me want to do something about it? I… I don’t know, I’m not following.”

It’s body language all over again, a subject she’s never been strong in. Whatever Green is saying is just a feeling without a frame of reference, a sound without a gesture. It’s something best felt and understood within the scope of a greater social web. Which actually gives her an idea. If one part of Voltron wants to communicate, it’s likely the other parts understand the message. She rubs a thumb across her lion’s chin in a plead for patience and says, “Can you ask Blue to join us?”

“She heard you,” is what Allura whispers instead, watching in awe as the lioness across the room gracefully rises to all four feet and swings glowing eyes in their direction. It takes great willpower not to cower as Blue’s slow, heavy footsteps make the ground quake beneath them. For a moment it becomes obvious why friend and foe of the paladins alike revere Voltron like a god and its feline parts like mythical monsters, because a prehistoric part of the Green Paladin’s very human psyche is screaming that she’s in danger. The room feels colder and emptier with every step Blue takes forward, as though the walls of the hangar have fallen back to let in a wave of cosmic ash, and Pidge clings a little tighter to her own robot as Voltron’s left leg in the guise of a cat looms over them all, her great bulk casting them all in shadow. 

Their lions already move so flawlessly like live animals, and to see Blue pilot-free and displaying such intelligence has Pidge both giddy with curiosity and a touch uncomfortable. She searches up into the lion’s flickering eyes, and an involuntary shiver runs down her spine at the glimmer of quintessence in them. They may have spent years with these technological marvels, but none of the paladins have been completely immune to the unsettling power of the uncanny valley. Voltron, she’s discovering, is as much a biological entity as it is a mecha, a creation firmly planted in a grey zone Pidge’s dumb monkey ancestry doesn’t know how to cope with. Allura doesn’t seem to be doing much better, if the trembling beside her is any indication. But determination to succeed wins out over discomfort, and when Pidge lifts a hand to beckon the lion down, Blue dips her nose and places it, with unbelievable gentleness, into her palm.

It’s hard to say if the second input makes things easier or more difficult. Blue has a distinct accent to her ‘speech’, much like her pilot, that much is clear immediately – the energy she plugs into Pidge’s body isn’t so much electric as it is a cascade of frost, spilling like the icy burn of morphine from an intravenous drip. It likewise seems to calm her nervous system instead of excite it, if the strange slow fog blurring her eyesight is any indication. Pidge takes a deep breath to brace herself against the pressure in her skull and murmurs, “Okay, you two, let’s try it again.”

The code each lion presents her with seems to run through her arms and up her spine at the same time, filling the cavity of her chest and blurring together like oil and vinegar. Green feels insistent, motivating, urging her to do something she can’t define. Blue reeks of compassion and concern, like a worried parent begging for assistance. It’s not so much a sentence they create as a direction they’re pushing her in, a set of emotions that don’t quite fit the hormone receptors in Pidge’s much smaller body, and the greatness of them push out at the limits of her physiology until she feels like she’s been shot through a flight simulator backwards and at top speed. Nausea hits her like a punch to the gut, and Pidge slides forward to press her head onto the cool metal of the floor. 

The sickness clears in no time, thanks to her hands having dropped contact to clutch her stomach and Allura gently stroking her back, and she’s too exhilarated at what she’s discovered to get caught up in the momentary problem anyway. She turns to grin at her teammate, and before the princess can inquire on the state of her health says, “Call the team.”

The moment Allura leaves to summon everyone else Pidge whips open her laptop and creates a new file, one she tucks above the interview logs and kinetic analyses and marks ‘LIONS’ in all caps. She immediately plugs it full of disjointed adjectives she believes explains the way the two behemoths flanking her are speaking, and fills a page with questions. In a rare act of reinvention, the Green Paladin leaves numbers to the wayside, tapping into the undefinable connection of quintessence between herself and the lions and trying to understand where their wavelengths fail to match purely using touch.

It’s soothing, somehow. The green lion has put out a metaphorical hand when no one else was offering, and has laid before her a cornucopia of potential, both for strategic planning of skirmishes and for the ever-lingering concern she’s been put in charge of. Though Pidge has no base in the metaphysical and no sweet clue what she’s doing, each mental approach towards manipulating her quintessence and offering it up to the sentient robot cats gleans better results and fewer headaches. By the time she’s explaining her triumph and asking the paladins to attempt the same, her entire spine is aching and she’s felt with confidence at least two separate emotions from Green – encouragement, and joy.

Her teammates have mixed success with their own lions, over the following days. Shiro, the suspected frontrunner, has no trouble baring his essence to the black lion, but seems to get limited responses from her, and can’t convert the Voltronic Code (as they’ve taken to calling it) into something he can explain. He spends long whiles staring up at the robotic pride leader with something like wistfulness in his expression, and more often than not gives up during training hours and interrogates his crew on their experiences instead. He returns to the hangar late at night to meditate and bond with his lion, though, when it’s just he and Pidge and a glowing computer screen, so the Green Paladin lets his lack of practice time enthusiasm slide. 

Allura chats to her lion like a childhood friend for varga at a time, taking the concept of ‘bonding’ to a level of instinct that humans and alteans seem to share in spades. Her general understanding of quintessence and inclination towards magic give her an apparent boost in ability when it comes to communicating with Lance’s former robot, though Pidge is willing to bet – with no due discredit – that Blue’s easygoing nature is part of why their talks quickly become silent to everyone but them. Pidge logs an entire two pages of notes after interrogating the princess on what thought-speaking to a sentient mecha is like. She does her best to then apply Allura’s techniques to her own lion, but clearly the methods aren’t cut and paste, because Green outright ignores her paladin’s attempts at awkwardly shooting the breeze. Pidge finds luck in Coding only when she’s completely herself, and when she approaches Green with games of question-and-answer. Her on and off, black and white responses are reminiscent of computer code itself, but that’s what Pidge understands best anyway. 

Hunk, again, is a special case. He handles the mathematical jargon of theory and the spiritualistic nature of colloquy with machines at an equal pace, and though he stays rather quiet each time the team works at their bonding he never appears dejected with whatever results he’s managed. Both he and his lion spend more time being still than anyone else who’s practicing, moreso even than the rebels and refugees curiously looking in on the events in the hangar for hours at a time. Their initial practice session, he makes like Shiro and spends a long while staring at the yellow lion. Two weeks in, he’s called out for napping on her broad head, a hundred feet in the air. Pidge has never known him to be a lazy person, though, and when she finds the two of them alone in her makeshift pillow fort after the day’s training, she questions him on it.

“It was easier to hear her up there,” he says, all nonchalance and softness, his face smushed into a balled up blanket, “When everyone on the ground is worrying and Coding, it muddles up the air and I can’t hear Sunny as well.”

“You–” Pidge tries, but realizes she’s understood maybe one thing he said in the entire sentence. “Back up, what?”

Hunk sleepily blinks at her with the one eye she can see in the sea of bedding. He stretches an arm up over his head, and it becomes apparent that he’s bulking out of yet another shirt, meaning they’re going to have to barter and modify alien clothes for him again. A dark path of hair on his stomach mimics the shadow of stubble on his face, all the more noticeable when he yawns broadly. 

“Sunny,” he begins, pointing a lazy finger at the yellow lion from across the dark room, “Is a soft-spoken girl, and when we’re all trying to connect with our lions the atmosphere down here gets really charged and busy.” Hunk rolls his eyes affectionately when Pidge frowns at him, and frees another arm from the nest so he can gesture as he disassembles his explanation. She can’t be as miffed at him as she wants to be, because there’s not a pinch of impatience in his tone. She may have to throw something at him if he keeps getting her to nod after each word she understands, though, because that’s just an insult to her intelligence. 

“We’ve been focusing on controlling our individual quintessences– quintessence? Did we decide on a plural for that?” Pidge lobs a small pillow at him for good measure. “Anyway, each paladin defining their energy makes it easier for the lion that chose them to communicate with them, but it also makes their energy easier for _all_ the lions to latch on to. Trying to talk to the yellow lion when I was standing around everyone else made it harder for her to zero in on me, so I isolated our position for clarity. But, cool thing is, I noticed the other day that all the practice has made everyone else’s quintessence clear enough that _I_ can feel it, too.” 

Pidge can feel her lips falling open in surprise, and Hunk grins at her obvious intrigue, rolling onto his stomach and stuffing the pillow she’d biffed at him under his chest. Delight blooms on his face like a sunflower would in the binary suns of Hopishii, crinkling his dark eyes at the edges and making the cool corner they’ve camped out in seem just a bit brighter. 

“I’ve got this hypothesis that if we keep on refining our bonds, we could actually communicate across distances through our lions. Paladins could talk to and maybe even pilot other lions in, like, emergencies. We could probably borrow each other’s quintessence to boost individual lions’ abilities in battle! Imagine a sonic cannon with three times more power pumped into it!”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Pidge whispers.

“I know, it’s exciting, right? I’ve been thinking about this all week and–”

“Hunk, why didn’t you tell me?” she says again, furious panic welling up and coating her words in barbs. She can’t help the unsettling feeling of betrayal sinking in, knowing Hunk is very aware of the complications she’s had, knowing he understands the importance of cutting back time spent planning and putting emphasis on action. They aren’t sure on the exact specifications of The Accident, though she’s done her best to guess the variables, but a week could make the difference between her mistake having been an inconvenience and a double homicide. She hisses a curse and grabs her nearby tablet, aggressively swiping the orange screen to life and jotting out estimations on how long the team will theoretically need to refine what progress they’ve already made in Coding with their lions, gripping the stylus tighter as her hand starts to shake. She can’t help picturing how her teammates will look at her when she drops the information bomb, disappointed and judging, blaming her for not realizing sooner what Hunk has purportedly known for ages, and–

A heavy blanket folds over her shoulders, followed by two large hands and the warmth and pressure of a head against hers. Pidge looks determinately towards the far wall, blinking back the angry heat in her eyes. 

“Take a breath, P.”

“Don’t–”

“Breathe.” Hunk rests a hand over hers, pulling the tablet from her grip when she finally abandons her stubbornness and inhales. “Hey, I’m sorry. I honestly hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

“You know what we’re dealing with, Hunk,” she says, when the panic in her chest settles back down to its usual low boil. He also knows she’s not normally a cuddly person, and that the close contact and steady movement of his breathing by her ear is full-on lunging into her personal bubble of comfort. But it’s Hunk, and even with her obstinate pride Pidge can admit it feels nice to lean on someone when her heart is trying to explode. “More than anybody else realizes. You did the math too. I can’t– we can’t just _sit_ on things like this. Long distance communication that uses quintessence instead of radio waves? We could send them a _message.”_

“The dilation would be too great,” he replies quietly, shaking his head. “If they’ve only just gotten your first message, there’s no way they’d get this one in any reasonable amount of time.”

“Don’t make shit up, we have no idea what the speed of Coding registers as or if it’s even subject to dilation.”

“Einstein’s tensor, Pidge. If it has energy it has the ability to curve itself and the spacetime around it.”

“Then I’ll figure out how to correct for the curvature!”

“How are you going to launch a _thought_ at a precise angle?” They’re both yelling in whispers now, frustrated but subdued by the reverberation the tall ceilings of the hangar and the four feline colossi watching them from the dark. “You’ve said it yourself, quintessence is a transference of electrons at high speed, so it’s gonna be subject to the same limitations as any other energy, including thinking, man, we use electrical synapses for that–”

“Can we not do the impromptu biology lesson? The lions have sentience and an associated intelligence that might surpass ours, they speak in mathematical code – what if they’re able to add a directional factor to a Voltronic equation in a way we aren’t aware of yet?”

“So we’re just going to ask a giant robot space cat to tilt their psychic message to a variable of X?”

“I don’t see you coming up with anything!” It’s the moment Pidge’s voice pitches up in indignation and shoves away from her partner’s grip that a deep rumbling bubbles up on the other side of the room, matching her voice in volume and then completely drowning it out. Both paladins jump to a stand, Hunk with a pillow held to his chest in the universe’s least effective shield. The hangar floor vibrates under their bare feet, shaking in such a perfectly timed pattern that the metal of the walls begins humming a somber harmony, but as quickly as it started the noise ceases, its last echoes fading like leaves falling from wind-disturbed trees in autumn. Hunk grunts, shaking his head. Far above them, eight points of dim yellow light shine from the darkness, two brighter than the rest and flickering like kerosene lamps. 

The Green Paladin steps forward before her teammate does, summoning her bayard with a momentary focused thought and scouring the blackness of the room before her. She catches a shadow atop the largest robot’s head, unmoving but lit faintly by the smolder of Black’s eyes. Squinting at it doesn’t clarify anything, so she reaches out to her own lion in a search for explanation. For the first time since she began practicing the language of Code, Green completely ignores her. Her quintessence bounces back at her like a rubber ball thrown at a concrete floor.

Naturally, Plan B is to fire the hookshot of her bayard at the black lion and toss herself at high speed into the dark.

Hunk shouts her name in alarm, the sound muffled in the rush of wind that flies past her ears. Pidge does her best to keep her limbs from wheeling at the disorienting sensation of sudden liftoff, stretching her legs forward to catch her inevitable crash and dull the chance of ankle damage from the castle’s 1.2G gravity setting nobody changed back after the Irthiisians left. She hits Black’s shoulder with a reverberating thump and tumbles forward onto her shoulder, gripping frantically at the interconnected plates of metal to keep from sliding clear off the other side. When her momentum settles she lifts a hand into the air and gives the Yellow Paladin a quick thumbs up, then ducks back down as soon as she’s sure he’s gotten the memo and begins a quiet crawl towards the still unmoving shadow sitting on the lion’s head.

She muffles the light of her bayard under her shirt and shimmies just behind the crest of Black’s ears in a crouch, finger ready on the trigger. If she leans outward, she can see the faint image of Hunk with his own weapon in full extension, the heavy gatling gun poised at his hip and tilted up towards her. She nods at him, then bounces to her feet and rushes forward.

It becomes immediately apparent that the silhouette is in fact a man, and one with a shock of white hair. 

“Shiro?” she asks, dumbly slowing to a stop and staring down at him with her bayard dangling from her fingers. It certainly isn’t a surprise to see him practicing so late at night, but she doesn’t recall seeing him walk in and he’s barely twitched at all the clunking around she’s been doing. He reacts to his name more immediately than any of the noise she’d made on the way to him, eyes flying open and gasp audible. In a split second, Pidge finds herself a hookshot short and with her arm contorted. The glow of her team leader’s galran arm is blinding, the electric heat of it prickling at the skin of her neck. They lock eyes as she hisses in pain, and his iron grip falls away with a speed lasers might envy.

“Pidge! Pidge I– fuck– are you alright?”

“I’m good,” she wheezes, breathing out the small heart attack in her chest and shaking the sharpness from her wrist. Shiro stares at her from the six foot gap he’s put between them, eyes blown wide and haunted by more than the faint light shining up at him. His hands keep rising and falling in jerky movements, stuck in debating whether to reach for her or hold themselves down. “Just startled me, it’s cool.”

Hunk calls to her from the floor. She throws another thumbs up over the peak of the black lion’s forehead, then folds herself into a comfortable crosslegged seat and tucks her sore hand between her legs, where she’ll be less tempted to demonstrate how much it aches. It may be the first time she’s personally sent Shiro into a fit of anxiety, but to her advantage, the past few years have taken their toll on the Black Paladin’s ability to mask his reactions, and her excessive study on behavioral ticks has given her a general idea of what he’s saying via unconscious body language – clearly, nothing positive. She does a quick glance of his bare torso and way the numerous scars across his chest draw sickly shadows as he heaves for breath, and decides they’ll both feel more comfortable if the conversation skips over what sent off the twitch response that nearly beheaded her.

“Your lion’s glowing,” Pidge pitches, “Did you have any luck Coding with her?”

Shiro settles into the distraction a bit like a man walking out of a car crash, slowly rocking back into a seat and looking at the other robots while the words process. Cognition returns to him all at once; Pidge can physically see the light of understanding return to his eyes and put energy back into his voice.

“I did,” he says, “Finally. I think she works differently than the others.” He makes wide gestures with his shaking hands, scooping and expanding them in broad circles. “The black lion is the central hub of the pride, so you’d think that it’d be easiest to communicate with her. But because in Voltron multiple sentient parts have a say in what the fusion does, the whole team is of equal value.” 

“You had to get the other lions’ permission?”

“I had to learn a bit about each of them before they let me talk to her.” The smallest smile starts inching its way onto Shiro’s face, happiness tinged with satisfaction. He meets Pidge’s questioning stare with clear eyes, and she breathes out a quiet sigh of relief. “A good leader doesn’t just take on the mantle and expect everyone to respect and follow him, he has to earn it. That’s why I couldn’t get a response from the black lion before – I had to build a base of trust with the other lions, one at a time. They didn’t so much give me permission to talk to Black as permission to try. She still had the final say.”

Pidge glances over the behemoths around them, the yellow light from their faces tinging the atmosphere this high up into a hazy gold, curious. She readies a list of questions to drill Shiro for, wondering at the order of hierarchy and which lions gave him the most trouble, if each was a gatekeeper onto the next or if he chose at random which lion to speak to. Could he interpret each of their Code clearly? But something occurs to her as she scans over the obvious crater of black emptiness where the red lion should stand, a thought that equates the view with a consent slip lacking a signature. If Shiro was able to talk to the head of Voltron by checking in with each of her component parts, then logically he should have had to talk to them _all._

“Shiro,” she gasps, leaning forward in realization and smacking a hand to the black lion’s crown, “You spoke to Red.”

The silence as he processes her words feels much longer than it probably is, and the echo of his sharp inhale will likely haunt her dreams for weeks to come. Shiro’s face goes slack with shock, his eyes darting back and forth as he mentally rolls over every conversation he’s had with the lions. The second he pinpoints that truth, his eyes go glassy. 

The night moves in a blur. Pidge recalls dashing forward to hug him, being crushed in the vice of his warm arms and trembling chest. She remembers the jump down from Black as the longest flight of her life, and the grin on Hunk’s face as she told him what had happened the mostly joyful she’d ever seen. She recalls slamming her fist on Allura’s bedroom door after tearing down the hall in a mad sprint, swinging around in circles as her brother embraced her and then promptly falling as he tripped over his own pajama pant leg. She can still taste the thrill the air held as the team lined up in front of their lions in the dim light of the hangar and began Coding as a collective mind.

They practice. It becomes the sole motivation of the paladins for a solid movement and a half, the one thing no one complains about doing or lets themself tire over. Even Hunk, normally the voice of reason forcing the team to take regular breaks during training, says nothing. He ensures his cobbled-together space family all find their ways to bed eventually, but he folds himself into a seat on Sunny’s paw and speaks with her late into the night, until even Pidge can feel her vision going fuzzy at her computer screen. He moves in recognition when she curls up next to him, so in honesty she’s not sure he’s sleeping at all. 

Pidge laughs at herself when she scans over her notes and the one concerning Lance’s gaming habit catches her attention, because her father was right – it’s suddenly applicable. Where he checked in on his animal companions constantly in _Killbot Phantasm_ , the paladins now plan to check in on their missing lion. The logic that defines their plan is simple: if Shiro can talk to all the lions, then he’ll be their messenger. If the team can loan their quintessence to Black, then she’ll be a stronger speaker. Most importantly, if all of them are connected, paladins and lions alike, all sections of a greater whole that need one another to function properly, then with their powers combined they should be able to send a single, pleading command to Red, no matter the distance.

She runs over equations for relativity and dilation a hundred more times, then checks the math with Matt and Hunk and even Coran. She works out an estimation on what kind of strength their message needs to be to overcome the constraints of spacetime, and confirms that the period since her first video message will have been long enough to give warning. They warp into the region with three heavy planets and one menacing black hole days in advance, rehearsing the summoning by parking alternate lions at a distance and calling them back (but never close to any of the celestial bodies, though she pitched it for accuracy – Shiro went white as a sheet and made her swear not to). When the nearest sun cuts a glowing halo onto the giant Earthlike satellite and coats the four airborne lions of Voltron in sheets of gold, the paladins give everything they have an reach out to their missing family.

_Come home._

They don’t expect an immediate response, nor a success on the first try. Shiro gives the team a moment to breathe, and then they try again. The dispatch never changes, so that even if just fragments of the Code make it, the red lion should understand. They call out repetitiously, until the words lose meaning and they all have splitting headaches. Pidge loses track of how many times they repeat the call, but no one wants to defeat themselves by counting anyway. They continue until Allura forces them to stop because they’re all in agony and their Black Paladin is hardly conscious, and even then he fights for it. 

They get no response.

Hunk stands with her at on the observation deck afterwards, staring out into the abyss, holding her around the shoulders even as salty tears track steady lines down his face. She can’t remember whether she followed him or the other way around, nor does she know who’s supposed to be comforting whom. She hasn’t yet faced her calculations and where she went wrong, stubborn instead in her want to wait. Give it time, she tells herself, give them more time than you think they should take, more than makes sense. She stands and waits for hours, contumacious with spite, and dares the universe to tell her everything she did was worthless.

Suddenly, Hunk sucks in a breath.

She slams her hands to the glass, glaring out at the stars at the shimmering comet moving towards them.

They both turn and run to the hangar like there’s hell at their heels, hearts hammering.

The most metaphorical recesses of her brain see the room as nothing more than an extension of the universal void when the airlock opens and a mechanical feline drifts in, dreamlike, surreally glossy and undamaged by the extra four years of damage her sisters have faced. The red lion lands with the lifelike mockery of a newborn kitten, glitching like no piloted vessel should. She stumbles to her cubby, stiffens like a statue, and audibly powers down. A holoshield fires up around her, bold and defiant, and confirming Pidge’s worst fears. 

The ice that stills her pulse and has Hunk crumpling beside her feels distinctly like the chill of an indifferent cosmos. The pounding footsteps entering the room are a thunder becoming farther away, and the mourning cries that fill the bay in growing pitch render her deaf instead of emotional. The fading glow of Red’s eyes are a symbol of extinguishing hope. 

Pidge has studied the actions of her fellow paladins in excruciating detail in an attempt to understand what and why they were feeling at any given moment. She’s spent countless hours identifying and defining physical expressions of emotion, and by all measurable markers has gained a strong grip on the subject. 

She looks upon the maelstrom of body language around her now and wishes she’d never started trying.


	4. War Isn't Cheap and You've Paid With An Arm Already

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Autocorrect has been fighting me on all fronts about my Canadian usage of the letter U and I'm suffering, help.
> 
> For those of you wondering where the boys are in this Keith/Lance-centric fic, know that there're two more chapters of exposition until we're sticking to their perspectives exclusively, so please sit tight and enjoy the rest of the team ribbing each other until then. This was one of my favourite character point of views to write (and the first chunk of the story I finished), and I promise the info in these filler bits is important. I'd love to hear your theories on where the plot's going!
> 
> Big heads up for body horror in this chapter, but know that I'm a wee baby marshmallow and can't handle anything graphic, so you won't have to either.

Hunk likes to think of himself as a feelings guy. He’s in touch with his own emotions and sensitive to the people around him, which is half the reason being around Lance and Keith, especially together, for too long gives him a headache. Pidge is fine, Pidge stares into a computer screen and zens out from the world – or the cosmos, technically – and becomes so engrossed in whatever she’s doing on there that the mood remains a relaxing neutral. Once upon a time Hunk had read into theories that tech did all kinds of weird things to the human psyche, that it made your sleep schedule screwy and offset your sanity with its positive ions, but as far as he knows all the humans back home playing with ionic thrust for the purpose of space travel haven’t yet lost their minds, and the team’s Green Paladin seems to be no worse for wear than the rest of them after long spurts without sleep. Earth time is completely relative, and where as they’re outside of any planet with a solar cycle it’s about fair to assume that computer vibes have as much of a say in their state of consciousness as this whole magic robot space cat adventure does. Point being, there might be some funky tech juju in the air when Hunk sits near Pidge, but otherwise she’s one of the safest people to be around for his mental health. 

Shiro is not. Shiro feels like a fifty pound iron ball sitting at the ready in the barrel of a cannon that only needs a little spark to come hurtling into a danger zone. He’s like the first scent of something burning when you’ve been away from the oven too long and forgot to set a timer. Like any other handful of metaphorical examples that make him really nerve-wracking underneath all that military seriousness and gentle reassurance, and Hunk is willing to believe he’s the only person who’s picked up on it, simply because everybody else is either too invested or too removed from Shiro as a person to notice. That’s where his skillset comes in – he’s safely in the awkward locality of a friendquaintence, so Shiro’s neither too bottled up for him to read nor deflecting curious watch. Everybody trusts a guy who feeds them, and though he’s yet to see the dam break he’s been there at some pretty suspicious points in Shiro’s Black Paladin career. The mice drop him hints on when to make a separate batch of extra crispy food goo cookies for their fearless leader because they pick up on funky vibes too, but again, he only knows that’s what they’re on about because he’s the feelings guy. All empathy, all the time, even for rodents. 

Shiro hovers in the background with his smothered feelings, and that Hunk knows how to handle. But part of their relationship is also him taking orders from the guy, and that’s a harder area to discern for emotions, especially because most of the time Hunk’s running on pure anxiety of his own with a multiplier courtesy of everyone else, and then has to trust that even the man whose aura is saying they’re tanked has got things under control. Hunk has to believe he isn’t going to die following Shiro’s commands.

Hunk trusts Shiro, he really does, but watching the man sigh as he runs a hand through his hair and hearing, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” under his breath as the rest of the team dash for their lions isn’t the kind of pep talk to leave him confident and encouraged. Still, duty always calls.

“We’re coming in hot,” Hunk says into the comm as his lion tosses the remains of a galra fighter off to the side, where it presumably becomes a smoldering wreck of scrap metal against a dusty hillside. “Sunny and I aren’t exactly subtle, so if somebody wants to keep these ships distracted while we get into position that would be _great."_

“Pidge is on it,” comes the Black Paladin’s reply, and there’s a hoot and maniacal cackling through the communication line as an invisible entity starts flinging fighter jets around him like paper off a birthday gift. The yellow lion does a loop and twirl that leaves Hunk’s stomach rattling in his gut and they slide out of sight behind another tall mountain range. There’s reassurance in the calm tone on the line, but something still feels off about Shiro’s voice, and Hunk has to remind himself of the promise he made to be less negative as the immense need to cry _we’re so boned_ tumbles on his tongue. He rips the controls in opposite directions with the nervous energy instead, and his lion skids around a tight turn with a finesse that Red would have been proud of.

Hunk swallows another uncomfortable emotion as his brain reminds him that _Red isn’t here;_ with a burst of momentum that has G forces smooshing him into his seat, they rocket forward and continue towards the blinking point on the map that’s laid out on the windshield. Yellow likes the earth, likes running more than flying, so it’s only a matter of time before she’s barrelling full-tilt down a valley and the deep _wha-doom, wha-doom_ of her bulk is meeting the pound of Hunk’s heart beat for beat.

There’s a group of refugees somewhere here, all clumped together in a dangerously obvious swarm, desperate for protection and not bright or fast enough to make themselves less of a target for the incoming galra fleet. The yellow lion has armour like none of the others do, and in a terrain as narrow and winding as Arondid’s there’s a decent chance she and Hunk can play umbrella to the herd of escapees and get them far away from their burning city and into the safety of cave formations Coran’s mapped out from the castle. Aeons ago the planet had been something like a Balmera, rife with the kind of resources Alteans loved trading for (namely, the main component of food goo, some algae-like product that grew in their marshy undergrounds and kept the bland sustenance from spoiling for decades, while donating minerals that were pretty hard to find in space unless you were willing to skim the edges of dying stars), but the ruling people of Arondid have long since forgotten that was a thing and now spend most of their time farming ridiculous cotton candy-shaped trees. Trees which are mostly on fire and blown up at this point. Hunk gives the holoscreen an anxious glance as Yellow skids around another corner on her claws.

“Can somebody confirm that everyone who needs an escort is in the same spot?” he says, and Coran’s face pops up in his forward display, all smiles under his bright orange mustache, “I’m aiming for a ‘get in, get out’ sort of plan and if we gotta backtrack for anyone that’s gonna put all the other Arondians in danger.”

“Not to worry, number two, bio-scans of the surface are all clear. You’re coming up on the citizens now. I’d say your Plan GIGO should go off without a hitch.”

“I like that,” comes a laugh from another line, and despite the chaos of explosions and shaking camera that highlights how much dodging Matt is doing from inside his own vehicle, he adds a casual, “Hold on a sec, Hunk, I’m heading your way with a couple of tailers. Shiro, you wanna take these guys out?”

“What are you even driving?” Hunk asks, squinting at the second dash camera feed that’s displayed for him, grainer and more pixelated than Coran’s. The sounds of war are doubly echoed as both the video and nearby mountain shake and dust sprays across the yellow lion’s path. “I thought you were riding with Pidge.”

“Turns out Arondian farming equipment is very similar to Earthling. I found a backhoe.”

“You’re using a _backhoe_ against a fleet of _galra fighters?”_

“I’m living the dream, Hunk! What boy didn’t want to play with construction vehicles as a kid?” 

“You,” Pidge chips in, too busy executing a perfect barrel roll over where Yellow is running to bother engaging her video feed, but the exasperated teasing is clear in her tone. “Mathematics Holt over there spent recess making 3D models of spaceships. Dump trucks were beneath him.”

“Cute,” Shiro chuckles, his addition to the banter startling enough that everyone listening jumps. Hunk makes another mental note on his Feelings Guy file for Shiro; there’s a side to him that’s begun to shine through since the rebels joined the Voltron Coalition ranks, and especially since Pidge’s brother began living in the castle, one that’s playful and a little more relieved. The Black Paladin is usually always business during missions, his more easygoing persona put on the backburner while the team risks their lives. A completely reasonable way to act, but one that none of the rest of them have managed; even Allura has been known to drop scathing jokes (usually at Lance’s expense) in the heat of battle.

“My advanced interests got me places!”

“Yeah, into a galactic war. Good job, nerd.”

There’s a familiarity between them, that’s what it is. Like the relaxed commentary between himself and Lance, the two share a history that makes things a little easier to bear, a bond that makes having faith a little more believable even when the world around them is going to shit. Hunk finds he’s glad to realize that Shiro has a right hand man again, and then abruptly hates himself for the thought, and then drops the whole line of thinking because he’s rounded the final corner on his trek and registers that Plan GIGO has a gaping hole in it.

“Coran,” he whines, anxiety spiking, “When were you going to tell me there were this many aliens to move?”

“What’s going on, Hunk?” Shiro calls, all seriousness again, and with a sigh he explains. What he had been expecting was something like their rescue mission to Taujeer, a group of maybe two hundred aliens who needed a little strength and shield courtesy of the yellow lion to get from point A to point B. What Hunk is looking upon instead is a milling of thousands, like the spillout of an Olympic stadium after a gold-winning soccer game, and to add difficulty to surprise the Arondians vary greatly in size. As in, there are stocky three foot tall pale aliens, like marshmallows with two legs, and next to them seven foot creatures with limbs like basketball players and skin of a dark ochre. None of them look particularly strong for their size, but all stand out as targets – the taller are easy to spot, and the smaller would be no challenge to crush underfoot in a stampede. All are perking up at the sight of the giant robot before them, and where some have begun to bow in reverence, others are frantically running towards the yellow lion and waving their arms for attention. 

There’s a great apologetic sigh as Coran’s image appears on the monitor again, lit with blue light as the Altean man flips through floating holograms of data. 

“As it turns out,” he says, rolling one side of his moustache between his fingers, “The Arondian people have a biology one could compare to stars. Not literally, of course, but the taller of the species are younger and show up much more easily on our scanners because of their quick heart rates and heat signatures. They’re like little suns, all burning energy and growth.” Coran squints at another screen and gestures for diagrams to be transferred to Hunk’s display, who looks past them in nervous favour of the desperate aliens trying to climb his lion’s legs. “They actually start to shrink and slow down as they age, like dwarf stars, and most adult Arondians – the small ones – have such languid biorhythms that our programs don’t register them as living. Hm. We should probably change that.”

“You think?” Hunk squeaks as Yellow lifts a leg of her own accord and flicks several leggy aliens back towards their group. Agitation spikes from within the crowd and Hunk’s heart begins to pound a little harder. 

“We’ll know for next time,” Shiro cuts in. “Right now we need a solution for getting these people out of here and into those caves. How many trips do you think you’d have to take to move all the Arondians, Hunk?”

“Oh, jeeze, at least ten, rough guess. That’s if we can keep mass panic from spreading and the whole group following orders, which I’m starting to doubt is a thing we could do.” A sudden scream of laser fire has the last syllable of Hunk’s answer pitch, and his friends’ cries of surprise fill the cockpit with frightening sound. The ground shakes under his seat. “What was that?!”

“Pidge, Allura, Matt!” 

“I’m alright!” is the quick, breathy response from Allura, followed by a string of curse words from the Green Paladin. Hunk quickly gathers that her brother’s choice in military vehicles doesn’t have much in the way of protection from incoming artillery and that her lion has taken a shot in the back much harsher than her smaller stature was comfortable with to protect him. Thankfully, the, “Enough with the language, Katie, I’m fine!” assures Hunk that both siblings are relatively safe.

“We’ve got company!” Shiro shouts as a second deafening buzz of energy shakes the ground, and Hunk grips the controls of his lion hard as he waits out the grunts and hollers of his engaged teammates. He knows even before Allura yells that they need to get the Arondians out that things are very quickly going south and he can’t rely on Shiro to give him guidance before he starts moving. Adrenaline is the mother of all improv, lucky for his rocketing heart rate; with a series of button mashes and a deep inhale, Hunk’s voice addresses the crowd before him in what he can only hope is a clear set of instructions in their language. 

The younger aliens react first, though with what Coran told him about their varied physiology Hunk isn’t surprised. What is startling is the way each tall Arondian seeks out a shorter and lifts them, then dart underneath the yellow lion in groups, like a sentient swarm of bleached lollipops . Despite the palpable anxiety in the crowd, at his count of two hundred and his lion’s affirmative motion, the remaining Arondians stop seeking their shelter and wait.

“These guys do mass panic way better than humans,” Hunk mutters, turning his lion around and pulling up the holomap for the short trek into the mountains. 

The clamour of battle rages around the caravan of escapees, rattling the stones that litter the yellow lion’s path and lighting up her armoured skin with flashes of explosive power. Her steps are patient and assured, fully focused on the task at hand, unresponsive even as Hunk leans to peek up and watch the blue lion streak by in hot pursuit of a galra speeder. Whether because of the adrenaline or the sheer scale and complexity of war, Hunk has always felt that time slogs when Team Voltron is in the midst of a mission. He tries to relax his eyes and take in the full chaos above him, but like a spectator at a fireworks show he finds that he’s too busy watching one cluster of action while another happens in his peripheral vision to fully catch every detail. The lions are cascades of supersonic colour, whipping over his head and dodging laser fire. Crashing mountains, shouts and curses through the comm, and the Doppler-affected low whizzes of fighter ships twirling around them keep Hunk’s nerves on high alert; the yellow lion fears nothing. Her pilot is no less than completely thankful that he was chosen by her and can lean on that strength in stressful times like this.

Though it’s only a few dobashes until the leggy aliens are making a break for the cave entrance and disappearing into the black of its shade, it feels like an eternity. With a quick breath of self-assurances and a pat to his lion’s dashboard, they turn around and run back for another session.

The work is slow, or at least feels like it. At the seventh lap there’s a great crack like lightning, and a wave of screams builds through the Arondian crowd as the peak of a small mountain begins to fall towards them, shattered by a stream of light from a galran ion cannon. Time slows to a crawl. Hunk and Yellow react in tandem, legs leaping and handles slamming forward in a mutual reaction. It’s only when the stone bashes into her armoured hull and Hunk does a frantic assessment of where the slowed fragments of rock are falling that it occurs to him they’ve left the current refugee group exposed.

“Nice save, buddy,” Shiro calls, and relief washes over him like seafoam, sticking. A glance confirms the black lion’s bulk is serving as a shield for the aliens Hunk abandoned. “I’ve got these guys, but we need to herd the rest of the group in this direction. The Arondians have sort of… frozen up, and I think they need a little push.”

He’s about to make a quip of frustration, asking how he’s supposed to hold this huge broken cliff face up _and_ move the citizens below him, short of shooting at them – which, although funny in a _dance, varmint!_ sort of way, is probably not something that’s going to win Team Voltron any points – when with a whoop and loud engine rev, Matthew and his borrowed backhoe careen towards the crowd and have them scattering like dandelion seeds in the wind. The dipper arm of the vehicle bobs up and down in the air, reaching and arcing over the tallest Arondians in a show of intimidation, as if it were a cobra preparing to strike, and the larger scooping bucket on the back scrapes lines in the dirt, implied barriers where refugees should not tread. Yellow whines as the stone above them shifts, and Hunk gives one of the handles a squeeze to encourage her to hold out just a little longer. 

A creaking groan – from her or the cliff, he isn’t sure – is all the warning Hunk has before the great monolith cracks and crumbles around them, chunks the size of transport trucks plummeting as the planet’s gravity becomes too much on the singular pivot point. Even through the thick metal of his lion he can hear the screams of the locals still below him. Another snap decision motivates Hunk to drop alongside the stone shrapnel, though slower, so the wall his lion is propping up serves as a shield along with her body. He isn’t sure if it’s luck or sense that moves them, but the Arondians below who cannot escape away from the deadly rain cower beneath the shadow of the robot of Voltron instead, and as far as he can tell none are lost by the time she settles her great claws around them. 

“Attagirl, Sunny,” he praises quietly, grimacing. The weight resting on his lion’s back pushes down on them, a ceiling of doom weighing into her legs and straining craters around the refugees. With a quick slap to the controls before him, Hunk calls down to the Arondians: “You need to move now! Follow the rest of your people!”

The aliens don’t budge. Hunk leans forward again in the off chance a few of the scared marshmallow creatures have darted out in his peripheral, but Yellow is quick to grumble at him that they’re still all there, a good fifteen strong and making no move to leave what they feel is the most shelter they’re going to get. He looks for Matt, hoping to invoke his scare tactics here, but can barely see the wiggling arial backhoe bucket in the distance, and it’s not likely the machine he’s riding is going to be able to climb the massive piles of new terrain that have fallen in a rough circle around his lion. He calls out to his teammates, and none reply, all distracted fending off the newest addition to the attacking fleet. Weapon fire rattles the ground nearby and the stone above him makes a low, strained noise like lake ice under heavy machinery. Hunk cringes.

“The only option, huh, girl?” he swallows, shoving back his chair and making a break for the exit. 

Intimidation feels like the most probable motivation for getting the Arondians to leave the danger shade, so Hunk jumps from his lion’s mouth – at a height, thank heavens for the booster rockets on his suit – with his bayard in full form and warning shots blazing. Wide eyes greet him, along with the mildly funny sight of creatures built like basketball players crouched in fear behind ones who look like overfilled water balloons of white paint. Hunk isn’t a violent person, and guilt eats at him for terrorizing these people when he can feel their already skyrocketed nervousness, but being a paladin isn’t always about the razzle dazzle. Sometimes, you have to pull teeth.

“Move!” he shouts, and charges towards the aliens with a guttural roar, channeling his inner Keith. His gatling gun thumps against the metal of his hip armour like a bass drum. Two of the Arondians flinch, and Hunk yells again, this time with a curse, before deciding he’ll sooner risk small injury than death by rockalanche, and fires a round of laser blasts at the ground between he and his frozen prey. One of the tallest aliens screams, another twitches like they’re about to meet Hunk with fury of their own, the smallest in front of him has eyes blown wide as saucers. But it only takes one Arondian turning to flee to kick up a herd mentality and encouraging the lot of them to make a break for it. Hunk shouts again, more in relief: “Yeah! You better run!”

Yellow moans above him, a fearful warning, and his momentary elation drops out of him like lead. He looks up at her just in time to see the mountain pitch forward over her shoulders. Her paws shove deep into the earth, pushing back, but the great weight has created momentum to powerful to reverse the tilt. Hunk can’t tell if it’s the glint of her golden eyes or the frantic nudge in the back of his mind that commands him, but the Yellow Paladin knows immediately what he has to do: _get out of the way._

He moves.

His feet scramble across the rough terrain with limited grace, boots sliding in the sand dunes of the planet’s surface and catching on the edges of stones. He activates his hoverpack on and off entirely by instinct, tilting his chest forward so the thrust shoves him ahead. He pushes himself off boulders and up their sharp ridges frantically, feeling thankful for his inborn brute strength all the while. Sparks light one of his shoulders as he clips a particularly jagged rock. Hunk doesn’t look back – he learned long ago that that only slowed a person down. Yellow roars, shaking the ground, and the mountain falling from her answers the call with a grating, rumbling screech of its own. Hunk curses loudly as earthen shrapnel begins impaling craters around him, but the sound is lost in the cacophony of titans above. 

He spots an exit, a clear landscape before him, just as the massive looming shadow darkens ahead of his dashing feet. He makes a desperate leap, thrusters at full and arms outstretched towards the light.

“–unk!”

There’s humming. High-pitched, a whistling, almost. White noise.

“I’ve– not resp–- Shiro I’ve– okay!”

It feels like his ears are pressed full of cotton. The whistling hurts, it’s sharp. Hunk wills himself to sit up, to shake his head and clear the fuzz in his brain, but finds his body glued down like he’s half-asleep. His skull weighs as much as a bowling ball, his arms are dredging through molasses. Alien molasses, which is purple and glacé and so sweet even touching it makes his teeth hurt. His bones, too, apparently. He groans, and his lungs give him a whisper of air.

“Hunk! –s Ma– say som– ng, bu–!”

“Guh,” he manages, and his tingling nerves idly mention that someone’s hand is on him, gripping his arm. Hunk’s forehead scrunches and he manages to open his eyes a crack. All they see is dirt, and a few bright lights from his HUD, but it’s a good indication he hasn’t gone blind. His neck still doesn’t want to move, even with the weird angle his helmet is putting on it, but with wobbly vision he makes out pale, freckly fingertips, and a dusty red-orange sleeve. Those are familiar, and the harder he focuses and longer the seconds stretch, the more the voice above him registers as one he knows.

“Fuck,” Matt says softly, and the cognizant parts of Hunk’s mind wince. “Quiznak” is bad, “quiznak” is a word reserved for only the most unfortunate situations, the moments when even Shiro doubts his instructions and Allura’s run out of ideas, when the castleship is at 2% forcefield and they’re surrounded on all sides by galra battleships, or when one of their team has been captured. When things are decidedly falling apart, somebody lets the alien swear word out, and nobody even bothers to admonish the choice. (Lance might have been the one exception, the person who’d throw the term out there just because it was a fun word, a shocker, something he could use as ammo against Keith, and of course the first word he’d pick up in the new language was a curse, but that was Lance being himself and _god_ Hunk does not want to think about his best friend right now.) A resounding “quiznak” is a sign everything’s gone to shit.

He doesn’t hear Earth curse words very often. “Fuck” is worse.

“Hel... m’up,” Hunk huffs, willing movement into his limbs, determined to prove to himself that everything is fine. Bit by bit he instructs his body, picturing each vertebrae in his spine mobilizing, asking every muscle to contract and push down on the ground, shove him upwards like Yellow did the rock face. The extra 0.5g of this planet’s gravity isn’t helping, nor is the numbness in his skin, but he wasn’t chosen as a paladin representing earth for any sort of physical or mental fragility. He takes a long, slow breath to force oxygen into every inch of his aching ribs and retries. “Help me up.”

The hand on his shoulder tightens, presses against his movement. Hunk growls, and the force comes double. His arms shake. Matt’s fingers squeeze his bicep, and the slight disruption makes the muscle give out. If he had the energy to do so Hunk feels he might start yelling at the boy with him for hindering his efforts, but finds the embrace of the dirt just a tad too comforting for that. Some distant part of his consciousness becomes worried about this tiredness, but the anxiety that would usually follow is muffled. He focuses on breathing, instead.

He’s vaguely aware that Matt has been talking, though the voice feels as far away as his emotions. Hands are patting down his side, and dust blows towards his face as his companion shuffles around and the bo staff he usually carries is unceremoniously dropped nearby. Hunk readjusts an arm, considers trying to rise again. Matt shoves it back down, and murmurs a stern, “Don’t move.”

He considers taking a nap. Right now that seems like a nice idea. His back hurts, the sharp whining in his ears has faded into a bit of headache, and the helmet padding under his cheek almost feels soft, like the pillow on his castleship bed. If the elder Holt sibling is anything like his sister, Hunk will probably be chewed out for disobeying his orders anyway. His lungs sigh contentedly at the decision. 

Matthew give his shoulder a shove and barks, “Hunk! Talk to me, what do you feel?”

He groans halfheartedly, annoyed. 

“Hunk! I need an answer!”

“I don’t even…” he mumbles, eyebrows knotting, frustrated and tired, “What… just lemme…”

He’s vaguely aware that he’s being jostled again, and that Matt slaps his shoulder. He doesn’t care. There’s racket coming from somewhere, probably yelling. More sand is kicked up towards his nose, and then there’re two voices, one that’s shrill and getting louder. Sudden pressure on his head, motion, and then a palm against his face. Touch on his back, on his arms, two sets of hands. There’s noise awfully close to his ear, and Hunk registers with a sigh that it’s a woman, likely Allura. The strength of the grip on his forearms suggests the same. 

“–called hypervolemic shock, he’s losing– I need you to hold him, got that?”

There’s a roar above him, so far above, though the ground shakes under his cheek. Something pokes at his brain, like all the hands but less tangible, and little shocks of fear hit his system from an external source. The world trembles around him. Everything’s becoming a blur, and Hunk matches the emotion with a little burst of irritation at all the commotion.

“Hunk!” Allura calls, and it’s not in her usual sharp boss-lady tone, but panicky. The paladin grunts in response, though he’s not sure he actually makes a noise. Matt says something, but he can’t hear it. Trembling fingers card through his hair, and he’s pretty sure if he could feel much more than tingling that her grip on his arm is bruising him. How the heck are Alteans so strong, when they look the same as humans? 

Wind whips at him, cooling his face. Hunk blinks lazily, notices the dirt around him is darker, that Allura’s thigh is shaded. He wills a slow breath and looks upwards as much as he can manage. The ground rattles again. He goes momentarily deaf as two lions bellow in tandem. The tickling at the back of his brain grows warm and cold at the same time, curls up along his spine like a body pressed close. 

There’s a big metal leg nearby, a Voltron leg, and it’s red. He wants to think it’s Keith. 

A wavy, blurry person stands below the lion, reaching up as it reaches its face down. Hunk can see all the sharp square edges of Red’s jaw, like teeth, and there’s a mesmerizing glow behind them. It’s kind of magical. Maybe it’s the fogginess of his brain, maybe he’s high? It looks like a painting. A smudgy hand traces the lion’s mouth, and something shiny that Matt is holding blinds Hunk for just a second, as if it’s caught the sunlight. 

Matt moves, Red rears up. Allura’s hands grab his arms so hard that the earth underneath him cracks a little. There’s a dazzling light, and so much heat, and before Hunk’s eyes give up on the seeing thing again he registers that there’s something very, very yellow moving towards him, something Matt is carrying, and it looks like it could cut through a galra ship hull like a sharp knife through butter.

 _Huh,_ Hunk hums to himself, as everything starts going black, and a drop of water splatters down onto his forehead, _that might hurt._

If it does, he can’t tell.

If it did, he muses, it might be really bad. Really hot. 

He could scream, maybe? That would be a lot of effort.

A nap still sounds good.

Hunk sighs, rubbing at his eyes sluggishly. His fingertips prickle, like they’ve been holding ice cubes. Or Ulanian iced _autïq,_ or one of Kaltenecker’s smoothies. He misses those smoothies. His stomach rumbles, voicing its rolling waves of hunger, and Hunk nods in agreement. 

He’s gonna make some kind of split. A frozen bowl of cream with flakes of that sugary leaf they picked up on Olkarion, and a stick of alien cinnamon grated on top. Maybe he can bruleé the plant parts. Thinking of flame makes him want something hot, though. What if he heated the food goo? He reaches outward, picturing the sparse cupboards of the castle kitchen, mentally rehashing what he’s packed inside over the last few pheobs for ingredients, and his knuckles hit something hard. 

Hunk frowns, and tries again. There’s a hiss, and warmth greets his hand, a moist sort of temperature that’s equal parts clammy and comforting. The image of the pantry before him wavers, then fades as he starts feeling around and his attention turns to sensation. He pries his vision clear.

“Oh,” the paladin mumbles, as the world before him tilts. He starts to pitch forward.

Solid heat greets him, as enveloping as a fleece blanket fresh from the dryer, masquerading as strong arms and soft skin. His lower body wobbles at the angle, so Hunk gives into it, but instead of faceplanting he finds his body drifting – carried – gently to the floor. He leans closer to the chest supporting him, lets his forehead notch into the neck. It feels like hugging Lance, almost, only a little bigger. He misses Lance.

“Hey, buddy,” a deep voice calls, and Hunk startles into consciousness. 

A broad palm is rubbing his shoulder, and when his vision stops spinning in double Hunk finds he’s cradled quite intimately into Shiro’s arms, which is definitely weird but not entirely unpleasant. If he’d known the man to be a cuddler he might have tried to occupy the space sooner. Still, it’s a situation they’ve never attempted until now, so embarrassment ends up the food for his waiting tummy and Hunk does his best to pull away.

“Uh, hi,” he replies, scrubbing his arm across his face and giving his head a shake to clear the fogginess, “What’s up?”

He’s seen Shiro’s expression crack a grand total of maybe four times ever, and always in response to Keith doing something stupid or self-destructive, or Allura doing something stupid or self-destructive, or Matt just being stupid. Watching the way his dark eyes soften and the thin, careful smile bloom across his face makes Hunk’s stomach flip. He swallows and quickly glances around, half under the assumption he’s reacting to someone else and half just to try and figure out what’s going on. They’re in the medical bay, he realizes, and with an awkward twist to see over his shoulder it occurs to him he’s just fallen out of a healing pod. There’s chilly fog still spilling out around the base of it, and he starts tracing its path down the round steps. Shiro’s touching his shoulder, suddenly, thumb gently guiding his jaw back so they can look at each other again. 

“Hunk,” he says slowly, firmly, the way he does when he’s giving battle instructions. The Yellow Paladin straightens, equal parts uneasy and curious. He wonders for a moment if this is how Keith felt every time he got a one-on-one talk from their team captain. “The transport mission on Arondid didn’t go according to plan. We–”

“Are they alright?” he asks immediately, intently, and Shiro’s look of surprise softens into a tender smile.

“Yeah, the locals are fine. You rescued every one of the refugees. They’re all in the nearby caves, and the princess has been working on a reconstruction plan with their leader ever since we pushed the galra occupation out. The Arondians are calling you a hero.”

“I was only part of the mission. They should be thanking everybody.”

“They are, don’t worry. But the planets’ prime minister extended his ‘greatest regards to the Golden Paladin, savior of the nadir minister, ensurer of the Arondian continuation’, if I’m quoting that right.” He smiles at Hunk’s blank expression. “One of the refugees that you and your lion shielded when the cliff collapsed was the daughter of their leader, the second in command and heir to the, uh, government. The prime minister has so far ended every conversation with Allura with the promise that they’ll be sending you all their best culinary delicacies as soon as they have access to their crops again.”

Hunk rubs the back of his neck, trying to smother the pleased blush he can feel crawling up towards his ears. His stomach growls happily at the idea of new tastes, and the general idea of food, which makes him wonder, “How long was I in the pod?”

Shiro’s face falls. 

“Eighteen varga and change.”

“Two weeks?!” Hunk begins patting across his stomach, his chest, his face, wondering what kind of injury he could have sustained to manage such a long time in stasis. Even Lance’s period in one of the pods after protecting Coran from a good-sized explosion was only a couple of days. Shiro’s holding his shoulders steady and urging his eyes back up just as quickly, and Hunk stares as the man takes a deep – hesitant? – breath.

“There’s something you should know,” he starts, gaze drifting for a moment, and Hunk’s not sure he’s ever seen Shiro look so worried, so… vulnerable? The mechanical fingers of his prosthetic arm twitch. “The red lion–”

“Did Keith come back? Lance?” Hunk whispers, wanting so badly to hope, recalling in a flash what he’d seen, but knowing the moment he says it that that’s not the case. Shiro shakes his head and completely does away with the notion.

“The red lion chose Matthew.”

There’s a long pause. Hunk’s eyebrows crease so close together that his forehead begins to ache. His heart is hammering, denial bubbling up as quickly as anxiety inside of him. The last time any lion chose a new paladin, they had lost their leader. The entire team had more or less accepted that Shiro was dead, or at least was never coming back, and Hunk doesn’t want to consider what this might mean for the two missing members of Voltron. He can feel his eyes growing glassy. Shiro meets the unshed tears head on.

“We don’t know why,” he says, stern, and continues talking through Hunk’s shocked expression, “But if it hadn’t happened we would have lost both the planet and you. Matt saved your life. We weren’t able to form Voltron, but with the red lion’s help we did push the galra out of Arondid and we were able to get you home to the healing pods quickly. There’s… I wanted to be here when you woke up.”

The words taste of dread. Shiro looks down, and one hand cups the back of Hunk’s neck, firm and supporting.

“I don’t know how much you remember. The yellow lion caught half a mountain on her back, and you jumped out to push the Arondians to safety.”

“Yeah.”

“The stone fell apart, and you didn’t make it out, not entirely.”

Hunk stares, waiting for the punchline. He’s alive, clearly, so unless Shiro’s about to reveal some fantastical tale about body swaps or magical cybernetic transplants Hunk’s not sure where he’s going with the story. He glances down at his hands, checks them back and front for any stitches or bolts. Nothing about him looks fabricated. 

“Matt heated a sheet of scrap metal with the red lion’s flamethrower. He was something of a medical officer with the rebels. He and Allura didn’t think you’d make it back to the ship if they didn’t stop the bleeding, and you were going into shock. In shock. You stopped answering when they were talking to you. Coran tried to bring the castle closer, but we were under heavy fire and it was all Pidge and I could do to keep the galra away from you three. The Yellow– Sunny stood right over top of you the whole time; I think she took out half the fleet herself.”

Shiro’s palm is clammy. He’s babbling. 

“It– what Matt did cauterized the wound and removed all the… all of what was left.”

His eyes are drifting downward, and Hunk follows the line of sight. His stomach immediately decides it wants to eject all the horror that’s been pooling into it, but the empty pit that’s opened up inside of him swallows even that sensation.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says, in the same moment Hunk cries, “Oh my god.”

There are nails digging into the back of his neck. Shiro braces him, holds him like a rod, allowing no weakness as Hunk crumbles forward, as his lungs forget how air works and Hunk’s shaking hands reach and pat and grip for a leg that isn’t there. The fabric of his flight suit, already black, is crispy at the clean edge, and ends well above where his left knee should be. He paws at it, tears it farther, disrupts the tidiness as if by doing so he’ll reveal the prize of his limb, but instead finds an unnatural lumpy stop. The flesh looks so smooth and polished, as if it’s always been that way, which is the work of Altean cryopod technology, of course. Thin pink scars zigzag their way towards his hip, unnaturally bright on his dark skin. 

“Shiro,” he gasps, “Shiro.”

“I know,” his teammate replies, and keeps repeating it, ever softer as Hunk starts wheezing. He can’t look away, can’t stop digging at the fabric, at where things are supposed to be but _aren’t._ He grabs his thigh and strangles it, and the ghost of a sensation runs towards a foot he can’t see. Stars speckle across his vision as his breathing grows shallow.

It’s the rocking that pulls him from the edge of a precipice of panic into a swamp of grief, the gentle back and forth motion Shiro starts pushing him into, the nose smushed into his hair and painful clasp on his elbow. It’s the kind of reassurance he’s wanted for months, the kind from an adult who understands his tumultuous emotions, and greets him and his façade of strength with a ready embrace. Hunk isn’t sure the catalyst is worth the comfort.

He’s aware that eventually they’ll rise, that Shiro will take every slow, clumsy step out of the medical bay with him, that even with a crutch under one armpit to make up for his monopedal walk the man with the missing arm will hold his waist and bear his weight. That if he asks, they’ll spend days in the castle kitchen, making anything and everything Hunk dreams up because it’s a distraction, because his team sought out ingredients from almost every planet they’ve been to while they waited for him to wake. That no matter the hour Shiro will leave his bed and talk with him over cups of tea, because Hunk needs someone who understands. That the stoic leader he hardly knows will explain everything he can about phantom pain and prosthetic limbs, will gather him up the way his _tinamatua_ did as a little boy and let him sob. That Hunk will learn this teammate’s ticks in a more confidential way than any of the other paladins, and find in him ways to soothe them both. He realizes this with some sort of prophetic clarity. 

His lungs fill with shuddering air.

“I know,” Shiro repeats, and Hunk wails.


	5. Strength Grows Best When Fertilized With Reinvention

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been doing so much dang research to try and make this fic as scientifically viable as possible and guys, I’m still cheating. Enjoy the realistic lava and unrealistic lightning. Also, this chapter took a week and a half to write and three days to rework, and if it weren't for [CaveDwellers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaveDwellers/pseuds/CaveDwellers) it wouldn't be nearly as cohesive as it is now. I am so lucky to have her.
> 
> Literally everyone is gay for Hunk in this canon. I can’t help myself. He is my sON.

Hunk is, in Matt’s humble and not at all biased opinion, a wonderful human being. 

The fact that he’s up nearly every morning before the hall lights have returned to their ‘daytime’ setting making delicious meals alone is enough to crown him king of the castleship, nevermind the fact he’s put his own life on the line multiple times trying alien cuisine and then bringing home the ingredients that didn’t make him violently ill to feed everyone on board. He’s turned food goo rations into gourmet sauces (a miracle in itself), discovered something so close to coffee the human part of the crew straight up threw him a party in thanks, and has honest to goodness taught Takashi Shirogane to cook, which was a feat known to be completely impossible. It could only have been more unbelievable if the Black Paladin had been wearing a frilly rainbow apron while doing it. Matt had tasted the simple slop-on-grain Shiro (under very strict watch) had put together last time and hadn’t keeled over, so as far as he was concerned, Hunk was nothing short of a god in space. Still, fears were stubborn bastards.

“Full disclosure, if I eat this will I die?”

“No.”

“Will my tongue go numb? Is anaphylactic shock a possibility? Will my stomach launch itself from its squishy meat sack home and take my bowels with it? I expect honesty, sir.”

“Do you have anything we can put on this that will actually make him suffer, Hunk?” Shiro deadpans, folding his arms and practically pouting in the younger paladin’s direction. His shirt sleeves are rolled multiple times and bunched around his biceps to keep them away from potential mess, which makes him look a bit like a child wearing pool floaties. There’s certainly an opportunity for yet another joke about the leap-year-born man being technically no older than six, but right now teasing him about his kitchen skills is sufficiently entertaining. Matt pokes the unadorned flatbread on the plate in front of him and mimes his skin melting off. Shiro snatches the dish back and grumbles, “It’s fine!”

He seems to rethink the claim when he takes a pointed bite; his determined ‘fight me’ stare in Matt’s direction turns into a puzzled frown after a moment of chewing. Despite his back being turned and hands busy at the stovetop, Hunk seems to sense the disturbance in the force and says, “It’s supposed to be more on the salty side. The sauce I’m making up uses a sweet flower from Olkarion with a flavour that I can’t tamp down otherwise.”

Shiro’s satisfied smile returns, and the knowledge apparently improves the taste of his creation, because he doubles down and takes another few bites. Hunk flips another flatbread behind him with a quick snap of his wrist, and neither of his companions mention the hard smack of his free hand hitting the counter to stop himself toppling at the motion. Matt suspects there’s more than one reason the Yellow and Black paladins have spent repeated hours in the kitchen, and a lack of staff to make meals certainly isn’t one of them, as a half dozen now-resident rebels have offered their services. Nor can he chalk the bonding up to a simple stumbled-upon company, because there are enough koffee grounds in the waste bin and enough vibration in Shiro’s fingers to suggest they’ve both been up for much longer than anyone else in the building, and only people with commitments willingly rise from sleep at the castle equivalent of 4AM. Matt has his suspicions on why they’re here so often, but again, nobody has mentioned it, so he doesn’t bring it up.

There are plenty of reasons he thinks Shiro is a wonderful person, and the scene before him is certainly a worthwhile exhibit for the list. The second the Yellow Paladin mutters to himself about a particular spice that might help his current dish, Shiro bounces up from where he’s leaning on the counter and grabs it for him. He pivots around the stove and holds out the plate when the next flatbread is ready to cool, so Hunk doesn’t have to turn. He continues his foolish banter with Matt even as the boy behind him rubs at his hip, and keeps the concerned glances at Hunk’s cringing face carefully neutral. 

But there are, incredibly, even more reasons Matt is falling in love with Hunk, and the mental list is growing so long he’s considered making an entire file of notes on the subject (keeping analytical tabs on people is a trait his sister comes by honestly, as it turns out). His generosity and cooking skills are certainly frontrunning attributes, but his sense of humour and willingness to join into foolish debates are winning him some big points too. His hugs are fantastic, as well, and though Matt can’t say he was ever much of a clingy person, he can vouch for the exposure therapy of a strong-armed embrace once or twice a day. He would happily take the guy on as a brother-in-law, or a best friend, or a partner in crime and science. Maybe a date, if Hunk leant that way.

Hunk continues to be an amazing fellow, and it shows in his determination to care more for everyone around him than his own very obvious struggle. He hasn’t once whined in the time since his accident, because he doesn’t want to take down the team morale. He hasn’t let anyone stop him from piloting his lion, either, and drew up most of the modification schematics for his pedals himself. (He also constructed most of it himself too, though Coran had insisted on being part of the process, and the “engineer’s uniform” he’d worn for it lives on in hilarious infamy.) Hunk hasn’t said a peep about how frustrated he is doing things with one leg while Pidge works on another prototype for him, either. Instead, he frets about literally everyone and anyone else.

“Are the Habjii and Jump squads supposed to be back in the next little while?” the Yellow Paladin asks.

“Not for half a day or so. They’re a ways out from this solar system still.”

“Cool, I’ll give Chyne the lowdown on this recipe before bed, then. They’re gonna be hungry as hippos after eating rations for so long.” Hunk hums his thanks as Shiro plates up the food he’s finished cooking and begins doling out more dough. He drizzles the paste like a painter creating a masterpiece, smiling to himself as it bubbles and browns. “Anyone know how Coran’s stomach is treating him? Either of you seen him this morning?”

“Not since last night, but he was definitely less green since he took that stuff that smelled like ginger. Where did you even get that? I’d bet good GAC we’ll never find a herbal remedy with a stronger scent anywhere in space.”

“It’s an old Batarr staple. Really neat, actually: they create biomechanical moles who can withstand crazy tectonic pressures and have them dig them up, kinda like how we used to use pigs to find truffles. It’s a slice of a massive underground rhizome system that Kitos said spans through the entire planet!”

“Wild,” says Shiro, and they all nod. The sizzling food gives their silence a pleasant background ambiance, one that, if Matt closes his eyes and tries hard enough, transports him back to lazy Sunday mornings in his parents’ house. He can see the golden toast of perfectly cooked pancakes and his mother’s flour-coated metalworking apron like they’re right in front of him. He blinks dozily, catching Hunk’s glance at him through his eyelashes.

“Status report for P Bird, re: breakfast?”

“Unfulfilled, probably,” Matt replies, watching as Hunk immediately begins overcooking flatbreads into charred discs of burnt sadness, just the way his sister likes them. They both know the plate of alien fruit the paladin had created an amazing dip for likely went untouched and forgotten in the lab a floor up, but that awareness certainly isn’t going to stop Hunk from trying again. He’s determined in a special, nearly exasperating way, one that Matt is becoming all the more enamoured with. It was no mistake naming him the pilot for the lion who calls earth her element; Hunk plays the long game in difficult situations. He hasn’t given up pressuring the Green Paladin to take care of herself, like Shiro mostly has, nor gotten fed up and snapped at her, like Matt did. Hunk continues to try, unshaken and undeterred, even when 90% of the food he brings up to her ends up as a snack for him instead. 

Matt thinks Hunk is a wonderful person for many reasons, but the way he takes care of Pidge decidedly tops the list.

He and the Black Paladin both bounce to attention when Hunk clicks off the stove and moves to collect his single temporary crutch. It’s a device not unlike the models humans had been using for centuries, except it’s constructed from the same matte pearl material as everything else on the ship. Or was, anyway. Hunk has modified it, and an elaborate set of harnesses now disperse the pressure of his strides down onto his hip and across a wider, forked base. The entire team graffitied it, too, cackling at his suggestion like children being offered a plaster cast. Two cutesy Holt caricatures hover under the grip for his hand, and there’s a long serpentine something-or-other drawn down one of the supporting beams that Shiro insists is a dragon. Between the six of them, the thing is an offense to the senses, and that’s before Hunk’s longtime Balmeran friend Shay and her wife wound some kind of braided plant over one of the bracing bars. It might be fascinating to watch Hunk strap the abomination on with the same kind of speed he does his armour, but Matt generally avoids burning his retinas on the details of the contraption.

Hunk is much louder and slower when he’s using the crutch too, something none of them talk about but that makes them all rather nervous. Distress calls are made to the castle on the daily, and though the lions now give them a Coded heads up when they sense the incoming quintessence of a Galra fleet, shots firing on the ship’s holobarrier still catch them by surprise more often than not. Hunk is capable of flying and fighting in his compromised state, but he’s not as effective, or as quick. Stealth is out of the question. He is as anxious to get his leg back from Pidge as much as the rest of them are to see it back on him.

Stubbornness is a trait Hunk has in spades, as evidenced by all the work he’s done on his mobility aid and the way he scoops up a dish of precariously-stacked food despite the huge sway in his gait. He’s also very perceptive, and though he doesn’t straight up call Shiro out on the twitch he makes towards taking the plate away, there’s a pointed _caught you_ tone to his voice when he asks, “What’s the plan for our next training session? I was thinking we could do more forced-handicap training, since the team’s still pretty clumsy working with limited limbs.”

They stroll through the halls as a group, waving and trading hellos with various rebels and visitors. Matt listens as the two paladins banter over the pros and cons of target training while hanging upside down. Shiro insists he’s been in that kind of compromised position too many times, while Hunk complains of the wicked headaches it gives him.

For his part, Matt keeps his commentary mostly to himself. He’s familiar with creative simulations and battle formations based on hugely hypothetical what-ifs, but most of his training experience has been with other rebels. There are plenty of folks in the Coalition who were already warriors before joining the resistance, and there’s a decidedly different feel to how they practice combat when compared to the paladins. The rebels expect casualty, and work under the premise that any live refugee is worth a dead fighter. They play dirty, because their limited resources call for it, and most of the rebels take things at a desperate, solo face value. 

The paladins fight from a completely different angle, one that favours protectionism and careful strategy, one that banks on more power but less room for error. A lost rebel is a tragedy, but a lost Paladin (or two) spells doom both for the team and the universe. They can’t afford to let their teammates fall or be seriously injured, nor can they neglect security and defense for their lions. Where a resistance fighter might sacrifice themself to ensure someone in a better position lives, every Paladin has their eyes trained on the others’ backs in a closed, attentive circle. It’s something Matt has struggled with since he started training with his new, exclusive team. 

“Pidge did pretty well in that last ceiling-suspension scenario,” he offers, nudging into their conversation, “She’s light, so it wasn’t a huge hassle for her to pull herself up and untie the ropes on her ankles, and she’s been resourceful enough that doing things with one arm in the compensation training didn’t slow her down much.”

Shiro nods, but as he opens his mouth to speak, Hunk says shortly, “Pidge always comes through in training, no matter what you throw at _them._ ”

There’s an awkward silence, one punctuated solely by the intermittent clomps of the Yellow Paladin’s crutch. Shiro cringes, looking away and scratching at his neck. He taps his prosthetic hand to the holopad on the wall and they step into the summoned elevator the moment its doors glide open. Matt feels like he’s back at the Garrison, looking everywhere but at the people he’s waiting in the small glass box with. Elevators are uncomfortable everywhere, evidently.

“Sorry,” the rebel mumbles, feeling smaller the longer he’s trapped in Hunk’s disapproving aura. Hunk isn’t much taller than he is, but he has the physical attributes of a brick wall and the emotional heart-tugging power of a sweet old grandpa – his obvious displeasure feels like both a threat to Matt’s continued existence and the guilt-inducing equivalent of kicking puppies. The Yellow Paladin looks sideways at him, his gaze appraising. He can feel Shiro’s eyes on him from the opposite wall, and vaguely see his crossed arms in his peripheral vision.

Matt hasn’t analyzed too terribly far past his initial gut reaction to the Green Paladin’s decision to give up gender — the sister he remembers from Earth has changed into something foreign to him, something he’s not sure how to accept. That’s a hypocritical judgement on his part, of course. But it’s one thing to tell himself it’s fine and another to believe it. If he’s being honest, each time this subject comes up, he’s rationalized his negative response with whatever excuse first comes to mind. 

He wasn’t present when Katie took on the identity of a boy in the early days of Voltron, nor was he completely settled with her dressing more or less like a carbon copy of him at age sixteen, hand-me-down clothes and all. He’s also never been told this is what Katie wants by Katie herself, because she so seldom leaves the upstairs lab or talks beyond necessity anymore. There’s very little the team can claim as a success nowadays, or even call progress, and Pidge has blamed herself for nearly all the failures. Supposedly she’s reinvented her identity in the cave she calls a lab, which sounds to Matt like a move made in desperation, a reshaping that feels like a remedy. He isn’t sure he should encourage it. 

“I– Hunk, look,” he replies, feeling strangled by his own words and the high likelihood that they’ll backfire, “What if–” He sighs loudly, and runs fingers through the low ponytail hanging over his shoulder as he thinks of how best to phrase what he’s getting at. He’s new to this part of the Coalition, to this intimate, tightly-knit team, and though he trusts that Hunk is a level-headed person the last thing he wants to do is create an awkward rift in the ranks. Picking sides isn’t conducive to success in a five member squad. “Katie’s amazing and I want to be supportive. I’m— it’s an adjustment.”

“Hey, it’s an adjustment for Pidge too,” Hunk replies, his tone softening as he nudges Matt with his hip. “Just because they’ve decided they want this doesn’t mean they’re used to it. It’s our job to help make it normal. Even if they do end up changing their mind later on.”

The word _normal_ is becoming a dangerous one, Matt thinks, in every circumstance. The way Shiro skirts around Keith’s name is a new normal. The fact that his own missing father isn’t a priority anymore, and how he and his sister have both completely stopped talking about him – that’s normal now. Reminiscing about Earth or guessing at how the team’s families are doing turns into a spiral of fear for all of them, so the silence on that front is also a forced normality. Matt rubs his fingers along the split ends of his hair, hyperaware of the discomfort clenched around his sore heart, jaded against change.

The elevator hums a little louder as it slows, and chimes a floor-specific song to them when it eases to a stop. Hunk pushes himself off the wall and toasts the plate of overcooked flatbreads at them in farewell, raised eyebrows inadvertently asking them to let him approach Katie alone. She can be defensive when she has too many visitors at once, and her closest friend is often the only company she’ll keep for more than an hour. Matt finds himself wondering if he’ll soon be on the list of people she avoids.

He’s outright sick of revision. He’s tired of making complex adjustments to his lifestyle and methods, done adapting to the endless garbage fire that is war in space. He wants to go home, he wants to see his family, and he would love to explore space on his own terms without the violence and loss that wake him up in cold sweats. Given the option, Matt would exist in stagnancy for the rest of his days.

It takes his brain a moment to get over its tantrum and realize he’s not the only one wanting things, and that there are some wishes granted much more easily than others. If Katie becoming Pidge is a normality she’s actually choosing, then he ought to get with the program. 

“Hunk,” he blurts, and a massive hand smacks the closing door open again. There’s a kindness burning in the Yellow Paladin’s eyes that implies he already knows what Matt is going to say, but a patience in the relaxed pose of his body that suggests he’ll wait as long as Matt needs to hear it. “Tell Pidge that I’m... here if they need anything.”

“You got it, buddy,” is the response, all warmth, and as the doors finally slip closed and Hunk’s clomping footfalls grow faint, Matt lets himself slump back against the elevator wall. He adds another memo to his mental list of why he likes his new teammate so much: being around him has, absolutely, made Matt want to be a better person.

Shiro squeezes his shoulder, the smile on his face rivaling a dwarf star for intensity. 

Matt and Shiro make their way to the basement without further commentary, though the relief radiating off the Black Paladin might as well be a massive neon sign of his approval. They hardly need conversation to decide what they’re doing, either; it’s common practice at this point to spend what free time they have together camped out in the medical bay. They wander the hall at a generally slow pace, wave at the two rebel pilots chatting in the wing off the pod room, peer past the frost of the one guy healing up in a cryopod and draw smiley faces on the glass. There’s a pointed leisure to their movement, mostly because it helps keep Shiro calm. The Altean ship might have vastly different architecture than the Galran vessels he was trapped in, but there’s no avoiding the potential trigger of the chem lab and its head officer, no matter how many times they do this.

“Good?” Matt asks, resting a hand on Shiro’s forearm. He waits for the slow breath and nod before tapping the scanner pad to open the door. They both jump anyway when a huge galran man comes rushing at them, teeth bared.

“It has been too long, friends!” Aztap laughs, hoisting Matt up by compressing his shoulders. His smile is blinding, his pupils just a smidge darker than the irises in the yellow haze of his eyes and blown wide in excitement. He shakes the new paladin, just roughly enough that Matt’s insides slosh, and then sets him down. The hand that extends to Shiro is drastically more reined-in, careful to offer halfway and wait for the paladin to meet his contact. “Two quintents is not a large amount of time, and yet we have made so much progress! You will regret having not been here sooner.”

“I already do,” Shiro says, genuine mirth in his voice. He grips Aztap’s hand firmly. “Show us what you have.”

They weave through the lab in a sort of conga line, peeking into vials and watch glasses, stopping for a moment at the centrifuge because Shiro finds the spinning mesmerizing. The two lab technicians greet them with smiles but keep to their business, politely leaning when Matt peers over their shoulders so he can get a good view of what they’re working on. He might have started the project they’re all focusing on himself, but it’s been a massive relief having professionals with advanced biochemical backgrounds cleaning up his cobbled-together prototypes, and at this point Matt has all but left the drug development to them. He mostly pops in for updates and to lead the testing.

Normally the latter would be a job for the head medical officer, but not everyone is comfortable with treatment from a galra, no matter how gentle Aztap has proven himself to be. He understands, and has prompted the awkward conversation with many patients since he came aboard the castle as a deserter of the Empire, pushing first for their comfort and secondly to address their racism. In a delightfully ironic turn of events, he’s actually become one of the most beloved personalities in the ranks, though Matt would put that heavily on the unbridled affection that gushes from him like water from a busted faucet. He’s unique among galra and refugees alike, a bastion of goodness in the chaos of war.

He’s also an attractive fellow, an opinion Matt shares with the vast majority of the Coalition. His smile is bright enough to be its own sun, and the intricate braid that gathers his thick hair into a crest atop his head and down his back at once signals him as put-together and playful. Shiro makes a comment about yet another colourful item he’s clipped into it, and they banter like old friends as the Black Paladin makes himself comfortable in a reclined test chair across the room.

Aztap hooks on all the inobtrusive monitors; Matt jogs over to plug Shiro in to the machine that works like an IV, the one he can’t trust any but human hands to do. His heart rate still spikes when the needle finds its way into his arm, but he holds Matt’s eyes and calms his breathing back to normal in record time. 

It’s always a fine line, deciding what’s okay to talk about in these moments and what isn’t, but Matt thinks he’s mostly got it down. The trick is to freak Shiro out solely with things that would be stressful even if he wasn’t heading a galactic conflict: resource management, interpersonal relationships, supervision of a high stakes situation. When he’s certain that nothing about the lab is making the Black Paladin uncomfortable anymore, Matt squats down in front of his teammate and goes, “The communication team has been flooded with messages from the Padarr Council since yesterday, fun fact. They’re thinking about pulling out of the war effort even after getting a whole squad named after them.”

Shiro laughs ruefully, rubbing a hand over his face. The stare that meets Matt’s eyes is affectionate but already exhausted. The heart monitor picks up its pace immediately. “Why do I keep agreeing to this? Alright, Matthew, fill me in.”

“The rest of the Coalition is rightfully pissed at them for being such absolute waffles when we’re trying to string together a stable defence front. Doesn’t seem like the actual Padi we have on board are as spineless as their leaders, but their loyalty hasn’t stopped the hate mail. They want answers. So do all the planetary heads, obviously, but they’re a little more polite about it. Or Coran’s just been deflecting their aggression.” Even the mild mention of a person Shiro likes calms him slightly, so Matt twirls his hands, channelling his inner Lance in order to dish the best gossip and consequently drum up the most anxiety. “Meanwhile we have no quiznacking clue how large the Empire forces are growing, because every battle we think we’ve won pulls a hundred more warships from the woodwork. You’ve been there, you know.”

Shiro begins leaning back into the chair, pressing his head into its rock hard pillow, his eyes closing. His thumb taps at the monitoring clip on his opposite wrist. Matt resists the urge to hold his hand; he grips his own fingers instead. 

“Hunk and I have run some numbers on the way they’re showing up. There’s something funky about all these ships, especially with how many we’ve taken out. It’s like the Galra are building three fighters for every one we destroy, or warping reinforcements in from areas that should be too far out of range every time we pick a fight. The Blades are looking into it, but they haven’t turned up any explanations yet. Mysteries of the universe, Takashi – they said we’d find all the answers when we traveled this far into space, but the joke’s on us.” Shiro snorts despite his shallow breathing, a brief smile flitting across his face. 

“The speed with which they’re showing up is another issue we can’t explain. Even the Olkarians can’t find a method that matches the kind of warp technology the Galra are using. It’d take way more power than they should reasonably have in their stocks.” The Black Paladin opens an eye at him, his eyebrow tilted in curiosity. Matt points up at the ceiling. “Oh, turns out there’s a couple of equations you can use to calculate what kind of power a sum of quintessence can get you – and Voltron breaks all of them, by the way – but unless the Empire is gathering a stupid amount of the stuff from somewhere we can’t see or sense, they’re circumventing a heck of a lot of space relativity laws.”

The tapping Shiro is doing against the metal on his wrist is quick and audible now. Matt pauses his ranting long enough to look over at Aztap, who’s buried to the nose in holoscreens recording the lead paladin’s bodily reactions. The faint EEG image of their test subject’s brain activity is lit up all over the place, and his heart monitor is doing a bit too much wiggling to be healthy. When they catch eyes, the galra gives him a thumbs up. 

“How you feeling?” asks Matt softly, and Shiro huffs at him.

“I’m taking a weekend after this, Matthew, so you might as well get your money’s worth. Tell me about the armistice.”

“I’m nine hundred percent certain you and Allura have talked that subject to death, but sure. It’s completely full of loopholes on both sides, to a degree I think even human politicians would approve of. That works super well in our favour, but it also gives Lotor way too much power to screw us over, especially in situations where we might need Voltron. From what I gather, only rebels can go wherever they want, and the paladins have to keep playing diplomat with the exiled prince of the Empire so we can both effectively get what we need and maybe eventually take out the evil overlord of the Galra. A true ‘enemy of my enemy’ experience.” 

He isn’t sure Shiro’s even paying attention to him anymore, too busy trying to hold his lungs back from the athletics of hyperventilation. His eyebrows are scrunched together, pushing back what’s probably a building headache. Matt quickly drops his playful demeanor and turns to Aztap for a rundown of samples.

The team truly has made leaps in their drug development. The doctor explains quickly which capsules hold what kind of quantities of the ingredients they’ve been using to make the pills, and Matt chooses which to administer. It’s a much slower testing process than either of them are used to, and they’re certainly not following either of their planets’ usual medical protocol. But given the fragility of human physiology, they’ve been erring on the side of caution. Matt tends to try the blends that involve more of the things he knows Shiro reacts well to, thereby introducing new substances one at a time and in small quantities (after extensive fluid and scratch tests). It’s been achingly slow work, but Matt is willing to play a Hunk-style waiting game if it means he can help his sibling.

Because that’s the point, in the end – creating something that can soothe panicked refugees and dull trauma in rebels, sure, but more importantly something that will help bring Pidge back from the mental precipice they’ve been tiptoeing along for a little over two years now. 

There’s a quiet hiss from the chair behind him as Matt notches the capsule of formula into the IV pump, one that assures him Shiro’s feeling the shift. He skitters back over with a tablet in hand for notes, and makes himself comfortable. Shiro’s arm is trembling, as reactive as ever to the sensation of external manipulation, but the medicine merges into his bloodstream like a waterfall into a river, and the shaking gradually stills. His tense shoulders start drifting down from around his ears, and the grimace on his face falls back into something more neutral. Matt glances down at the list of questions he’s thrown at this same man a million times, markers of sensation and discomfort, and catches Shiro’s fingers going limp. The moment he looks up again and opens his mouth for the generic, “What’s your anxiety level out of ten?” he realizes it’s already clear the drug is effective, though perhaps not in the way they’d hoped.

He presses a palm to his forehead and sighs, then pats Shiro’s knee gently. The man snores softly at him.

Aztap is cackling to himself as he looks over the screens reading Shiro’s status, pleased with the objective readings even with the loss of the subjective. Everything’s stable, which is a great relief, and the colours swimming across the live scan of his brain indicate he’s flipping from a soft REM doze into something deeper, so if nothing else they can pursue this blend as a cure for insomnia. 

“Another success,” Aztap says, rubbing his hands together as Matt takes place next to him, “It is a shame we cannot test more than one prototype in a quintent, but I am sure these results will bring us even clo–” The castle alarm mutes him, and Matt grips a reassuring hand to his elbow as the galra bristles, his chest heaving a sharp tempo. He stares up at the ceiling with wide eyes, as if the sound is readying to attack him.

Matt brings up a command prompt on his tablet and punches a few codes, and the blinking warning lights lose their cacophonous partner. It isn’t the first time they’ve been interrupted in the lab, so he’s come up with a bandaid solution to spare the doctor’s nerves where he can. A message from the princess begins blinking at him, so he sweeps the video feed onto the room’s larger screen.

“We’ve caught a distress call from one of the Batarr moon bases,” Allura says, immediately all business. Her eyes catch the slouched form of the team’s Black Paladin, and her expression falls. “Is he alright?”

“Overdosed on the sedatives,” Matt shrugs. He looks at Aztap for reassurance, and the galra nods. “He’ll be fine in a few hours, but I figure the guy could use the beauty sleep. I mean, look at him, he’s almost half as ugly as a Fenggarian.” It’s a joke, of course, the Fenggarians naturally appeal to every instinctive human aesthetic. They had stunned the more testosterone-inflicted members of the team into stupidity with their good looks alone the last time Voltron helped them out.

Aztap doesn’t catch the sarcasm, but Allura’s mouth twists as she smothers what would probably be an adorable burst of giggles. He winks at her, then shifts back into seriousness. “Is a four-paladin mission doable?”

“I believe we–”

“Hold up, make that three,” Hunk cuts in, his own screen zipping into view as a smaller frame below Allura’s. He glances behind himself at a closing door, near-whispering. “Yours truly got the laptop away from Pidge and they’re curled up on the pullout cot in the lab.”

Allura visibly falters. “Hunk, I… we’re short the rebel teams we could normally have assist us in battle. I don’t think–”

“Three, Allura,” he says, tone hard. Matt feels his heart flip over and only partially attributes the involuntary motion to the gravel of Hunk’s voice. A wave of absolute adoration at how protective this man is of his family washes over him.

The princess doesn’t quite balk, but her eyebrows scrunch together in displeasure. It’s very likely they’ll be verbally duking this subject out later on, but she’s got her priorities in order, so the conversation reroutes. She lays out the situation across the comms as the paladins gather from their various posts across the castle, and she defines the details as they prepare themselves in the hangar. 

Scanning their armour on with the new holoprinter goes well – Hunk’s chestplate is only a little off-center, which is a huge improvement from the last mission when it appeared around his head. Matt clicks his armguards secure and glances up at the red lion. A shiver of excitement fizzles along his spine, one Red’s eyes twinkle along to. 

They spiral towards the moon with as much stealth as their giant, brightly-coloured ships allow, Matt taking the lead as a scout. Word is, the scanners the moon base has on its light side indicate a galran presence on the dark side, and it’s a matter of half an hour before their little satellite turns around and faces the Empire ships head on. There’s something immensely suspicious about a galran fleet just waiting to attack, as well, given the speed and maneuverability of their smaller fighters. But as he creeps closer, Matt begins to suspect the enemy force isn’t exactly meant for raiding.

“That’s a big ol’ gun,” Hunk reports, browsing over the video footage the red lion has relayed back to him. “It’s a lot like the ion cannons on Galran battleships, you can tell by the counterweights in the base and the gyroscope compartments on the arms. But the actual barrel is a different shape. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before.”

“Nor I,” Allura muses. But regardless of their familiarity, the weapon is definitely trained on an area the Batarr base is soon to rotate into, which has Matt suspicious. There’s nothing particularly threatening or interesting kept on that moon, nor is it densely staffed. The entire Batarr system is pretty barren, all things considered. The population isn’t really worth conquering, and the resources are minimal at best. He eyes over the cannon and considers what he’d do with such a thing. The answer hits him like a truck.

“They’re testing it. It’s some kind of new weapon, and they’re trying it out in a quiet area. They don’t think the Batarr will see them until it's too late.” A horrifying related thought strikes him: if they weren’t nearby, nothing would have prevented the tiny alien construction from being silently nuked out of existence, and all its residents along with it. “So we’re going to take it apart.”

He doesn’t stop to think about how, and attributes the brashness to his title as Red Paladin. He isn’t worried, though – they have the element of surprise, three superpowered sentient robots, and a pretty meager fleet to face. He and Red dive in with teeth bared and have three fighter jets torn to shrapnel before the other two lions catch up. The Galra ships scramble, and in milliseconds the area erupts in lines of laser fire. Matt has long since lost count of how many times they’ve gone into battle, but this feels like another familiar pattern: the lions do some violent acrobatics in space for a few minutes, and then the universe gains a little more galran dust. Even with their decreased ranks the team has no trouble; Allura keeps sneaking up on the larger ships and tearing the roofs off them like she’s peeling open cans of sardines, and the yellow lion is more or less pinballing her way through the crowd, crumpling fighters with her bulk and momentum. It feels like an assured win, even as the Batarr base slowly rotates into view.

“One left, team. Princess, would you like to do the honours?” Matt resists the urge to put his feet up on Red’s dash, altogether pleased with the efficiency of their defense and mentally putting together an embellished retelling for the two missing paladins. Twenty-six dobashes is a new record for a battle of this size.

Allura grins at him through the comms and readies her lion for a sonic blast, but, impossibly, the enemy cannon is faster. Like the quick-draw king of a western flick, the barrel of the massive gun flips, arcs of pink lightning skittering across its metal length.

Matt blinks the haze from his eyes in a panic, sure he’d seen the image of the cannon triple in its movement. The silence of its motion in the void makes the change all the more surreal. But Allura’s screech pierces his eardrums as the electricity fires in her direction, and his own lion matches the noise as she winces back from a wave of electromagnetic radiation. Blue tumbles away, legs curled in on herself. 

“That’s not a normal gun!” Hunk shouts, powering towards Allura. He weaves between the shrapnel of the larger vessels, narrowly missing shots at his own lion’s flank. The cannon skitters like a glitching screen, its readjustments stopping and starting just out of the visible framerate of the human eye. Matt summons an extra layer of UV shielding for his helmet glass to spare himself the constant squinting and slams Red’s controls towards the galran weapon, hoping he can use his lion’s speed and Hunk’s distraction to his advantage. He’s barely within firing distance when it turns its glowing barrel on him, and he manages only a single laser shot before he’s cartwheeling out of range.

“I’m alright!” the princess assures them, though her voice is laboured. Her video feed trembles with static as she leans back in her seat and pets her control handles reassuringly. “ _Aveshæwa_ didn’t take too much damage, we were just grazed.” Her expression hardens immediately as another blast rockets off in her direction. The yellow lion deflects the shot with a thrown chunk of spaceship, and it’s immediately incinerated. 

“I’ve got a stupid idea, if you’re game. This thing’s got a pretty singular aim, so if we charge it from three different angles, we’ve got a two-thirds chance of hitting it.” Matt watches the weapon from his lateral vantage point and feels fairly confident even heavy Sunny could manage a blow if they all were to attack in tandem. He tosses the remains of a battleship engine towards the cannon and chases it with a few laser shots.

“You mean we’d have a sixty-six percent chance.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah, Princess, a two-third would mean we have a point-six to the infinite of a single chance of hitting the thing. That’s neither correct math nor something I’m willing to bank my life on.”

“Semantics _aside,_ any possible strike against this machine is worth trying. Matthew, I suggest you take the middle position. The red lion is the speediest of us all, and the cannon is most likely to shoot at a forward-facing target.”

“We’re gonna wanna hurry, too,” Hunk adds, stress thinning his voice, “I can see the Batarr base. Time is tight.”

They arc into position almost gracefully, red and blue lions twirling around each other to avoid debris as they trade spots. The galran culverin is pointed in their general direction and still humming with energy, but the crackling electricity dancing across its barrel has settled down to a low fritz. Matt skims over the sensors he’d had trained on it since he’d initially scouted the ship, and comments, “It might actually have a refractory period, folks. Now’s our chance.”

Allura counts them down. The three paladins punch the thrusters in tandem, and their lions kamikaze downward.

Matt recalls the following moments in flashes, beats that match the explosions the cannon fires in their direction. It shimmers back and forth between the lions, hurling fuchsia light that sheers past them and ricochets off shrapnel like fireworks. Allura corkscrews upward and then takes a nosedive towards its bracing posts, ice shards gatling from the maw of her lion. He goes momentarily deaf as an explosion rocks her ship, and hardens his heart against the sight of the blue lion falling back, sparking. Hunk roars at his right, massive claws appearing over his lion’s natural ones, the metal arms reaching forward for a deadly embrace. A line of lightning strikes Yellow’s hind leg, and half a battleship cracks across her face, pushed by another shot. Matt shouts for both his teammates, but only one responds.

It’s not a verbal request that meets him, either. Code blasts through his skull, begging him to understand a single directive, even after its translation through two lions. Matt pushes a confirmation back, feeling sluggish in his Coding but certain Hunk will hear him, if a split second slow. He looks death in the face as the gun launches electricity at him, pulls his lion away from the blast with a turn so sharp it could cut, and beelines straight for the battered face of the yellow lion. He doesn’t need sound to feel Hunk roaring along with him, and knows the moment their bayards slam into their respective lions’ holsters. The act of fusion grabs every nerve in his spine and yanks.

It feels very much like being part of Voltron, and yet drastically, frighteningly different. The distinctive burning presence of his own lion clings to his skeleton, but a secondary hum has layered on top of it, a heaviness that roots him deeper into his piloting chair and presses confidence into his grip on the controls. Matt is certain he can feel Hunk grin, because the excitement shudders through his nerves as well, uncomfortably intimate. They raise a broad mechanical fist together, watch the claws lock into place, and Matt whoops.

Matt can’t tell what sort of shape their lions have created together, exactly, but it feels humanoid, and it definitely has firepower. The doubled force of their thrusters send them careening towards the cannon at something assuredly faster than light, since the shifting of the galran weapon looks like even pulsing instead of a dizzying strobe now. Their bulk slams into the gun before it can successfully lock onto them, and a broad armoured shoulder leads the attack. There’s a satisfying creak as it tilts, so he and Hunk follow up by tearing one of the supporting legs clear off its base. The hands on their conjoined robot are mismatched, one small and the other wide and fortified with gleaming silver talons. 

The cannon revs up for another attack, despite its skew. The Red and Yellow Paladins twist their controls, and the smaller of their robot’s fists morphs into its own wide artillery. They slam the barrel against the thick connecting wires of the cannon, suck in a mutual breath, and fire.

Magma erupts across the machine, tinting their cockpits in searing red light. The endless spill melts every inch of the cannon it touches instantly, wrapping its disassembled atoms in bubbles and drifting around them like water droplets in the gravitational void. The electricity fizzles, diodes of its light latching on to the molten elements like luminescent dust bunnies. The paladins turn their weapon on the pedestal and control office below, and in moments it’s evaporating. The Batarr moon base spins languidly into a peaceful night, one lit with a new tiny sun.

It takes a long moment before both men realize there’s noise coming from Blue, too wrapped up in the haze of connection between their own brains and the Code of their lions. They turn slowly to face her, and Allura’s joyful laughter sparkles through their consciousness like the carbonation in champagne. 

“Incredible!” she shouts, and the video screen that pops up on their dashes shows her bent double, face stretched in a hysterical smile and tears running every which way down her cheeks. “Father never could have imagined!”

Hunk lets go of him gently; the clanking of their lions as they untangle from each other is muffled slightly by the tired fog in Matt’s brain. He slouches back into his seat, limbs trembling, and grins. His teammate’s voices drift farther away, checking status and marvelling over their newly-discovered abilities.

“Twenty-five possible combinations! I mean, if we assume we can merge two, three, and four of the lions at a time. That’s a crazy amount of ways we can strategise! Just imagine, Allura!”

“This kind of power is unprecedented! We–”

“Wait, wait,” Hunk says suddenly, tension suspending his happiness, and the shift wakes Matt from his stupor. The yellow lion swings her massive head towards what’s left of the Galra weapon, her eyes glinting. “More power. That super fast cannon was over the top powerful. We moved even faster when we mashed our lion’s abilities together. What would happen… what if we supercharged ourselves?”

The question hovers through their silence, its weight teetering on a sheer drop. Matt and the princess glance at each other through the video link. Hunk takes a bracing breath, and asks, “Guys. What if we flooded Voltron with extra power and went to the surface for Keith and Lance ourselves?”

A thousand different worries and arguments fill the air, but not a single paladin speaks them. Allura covers her mouth with her hands. Hunk clenches his jaw. Matt pulls up communication links to the remainder of their team and relays the idea with clinical seriousness. It’s the first time anyone’s brought up the subject in years, and the debate between the needs of the many versus the few rages throughout them all. The risk versus reward measures differently to each of their hearts. 

Matthew Holt’s opinion of Hunk reaches astronomically positive levels. He thinks he might be in love.


End file.
